Myrtle Beach Photography

                                            White Balance Basics

I seem to notice white balance problems mostly at weddings.  There is different lighting throughout the event and auto white balance does not always do the trick.  Especially when your subject is in a full length white dress.  It is simple to fix in post graphics but why not understand and shoot it correctly to begin with.  Our goal at the studio is to do as little graphics as possible.  Below I will outline what white balance is, how to adjust, presetting the camera and manual white balance.  Manual is always best.

White balance (WB) is the process of removing unrealistic color casts, so that objects which appear white in person are rendered white in your photo. Proper camera white balance has to take into account the "color temperature" of a light source, which refers to the relative warmth or coolness of white light. Our eyes are very good at judging what is white under different light sources, but digital cameras often have great difficulty with auto white balance (AWB) — and can create unsightly blue, orange, or even green color casts. Understanding digital white balance can help you avoid these color casts, thereby improving your photos under a wider range of lighting conditions.

Adjusting White Balance

Different digital cameras have different ways of adjusting white balance so ultimately you’ll need to get out your camera’s manual out to work out the specifics of how to make changes. Having said this – many digital cameras have automatic and semi-automatic modes to help you make the adjustments.

Preset White Balance Settings

Here are some of the basic White Balance settings you’ll find on cameras:

    Auto – this is where the camera makes a best guess on a shot by shot basis. You’ll find it works in many situations but it’s worth venturing out of it for trickier lighting.
  
 Tungsten – this mode is usually symbolized with a little bulb and is for shooting indoors, especially under tungsten (incandescent) lighting (such as bulb lighting). It generally cools down the colors in photos.
 
  Fluorescent – this compensates for the ‘cool’ light of fluorescent light and will warm up your shots.

   Daylight/Sunny – not all cameras have this setting because it sets things as fairly ‘normal’ white balance settings.
 
  Cloudy – this setting generally warms things up a touch more than ‘daylight’ mode.

   Flash – the flash of a camera can be quite a cool light so in Flash WB mode you’ll find it warms up your shots a touch.
  
 Shade – the light in shade is generally cooler (bluer) than shooting in direct sunlight so this mode will warm things up a little.

Manual White Balance Adjustments

In most cases you can get a pretty accurate result using the above preset white balance modes – but some digital cameras (most DSLRs and higher end point and shoots) allow for manual white balance adjustments also.

The way this is used varies a little between models but in essence what you do is to tell your camera what white looks like in a shot so that it has something as a reference point for deciding how other colors should look. You can do this by buying yourself a white (or grey) card which is specifically designed for this task – or you can find some other appropriately colored object around you to do the job.