This requires attention (time) in post-processing, and if you’re shooting in JPEG, photos that look different from one to the other. White balance of 4000 After increasing white balance to 5000 InconsistencyĬameras will often set different white balance values between shots taken in the same lighting, just minutes apart. The camera can try to balance it, but probably not to your taste. This scene has a lot of mixed lighting…dusk, shadows, and mixed artificial lighting. Manually adjusting the Kelvin white balance gives you complete control over how it’s balanced, and it only takes a second. In truth, most photographers don’t either.īut that’s your decision, not the camera’s. The camera doesn’t know what to do in scenes that have a mix of tungsten light, daylight, fluorescent light, candles, etc. The resulting photo could have a strong purple cast. All that green tricks the camera into thinking there’s an unnatural green cast, so it will add a load of magenta. Taking photos under tree canopies is one example. The same can happen to tint as well as temperature. It was early in the morning, so the normal temperature would be around 4000K, but the sun was coming through a cloud layer and needed to be warmed up more. This is processed with a custom white balance of 5000K. I’m sure most of you would argue that this is too blue, a product of the camera thinking all those orange leaves was a cool light source. This fall photo has a lot of yellow colors. Whenever there’s a scene with a lot of either cool or warm color themes, the camera can unnecessarily add warmth or coolness to counteract what it perceives to be a cold or warm light source. But it doesn’t know what the lighting source is. Your camera has complex algorithms to examine the scene and guess what the correct white balance correction should be. With that said you can see why it’s a decision that might be better off left up to you, not the camera. Color is a major component of a photographic image, so getting it right is important.Ĭolor can convey an emotion or it can sell products. White balance affects all of the colors in your photo. Our brain does this automatically and instantaneously so that white things look white. So if our light source is a “cool” 2500K (amber), we add blue to balance it to neutral white. Unless you correct for this, your pictures will have that distracting blue or amber color cast. The camera needs to know the temperature of the light hitting your scene so that it can correct for it. Hot fire emits blue light and cool fire emits amber light, right? There are a million pages on the Internet dedicated to defining white balance and Kelvin temperatures. It wasn’t rocket science, and it shouldn’t be now. If I were shooting under thick clouds or in the shade, I’d add a warming filter to compensate. Outdoor photos shot underneath sunlight looked fine. I’ve started thinking in analog again and it’s made a huge difference…ĭecades ago I’d purchase daylight-balanced film designed for color temperatures of around 5500 Kelvin. Then I came to the conclusion that the easiest way to get correct white balance in-camera is by setting Kelvin temperatures manually. I resurrected experimenting with white balance cards, ExpoDiscs, and BaLens lens caps (which have their own post here). It got it right sometimes and then other times I couldn’t even recognize the photo.Īnd worse yet, the precise fine-tuning that became available instantaneously on our computers meant that I became obsessed with chasing color correction.Īnd in my recent mindset of not doing any post-processing unless it’s for clients, it became even more important to me to get the perfect white balance in camera. Auto doesn’t always make our lives better or easier. Shooting on AUTO white balance played a major role in my frustration. One of my biggest headaches when transitioning to digital photography back in the early days of digital was getting the correct white balance. Using Kelvin White Balance In-Camera for Better Colors I earn a small commission of product sales to keep this website going. Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links.
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