What is white balance in photography

Color—it all seems so simple. We took a picture, and the color looks great… if we have the perfect white balance. How often have you returned home, uploaded images and thought, ‘Hmm, I am sure that sunset was more golden’? Or ‘this snow was much whiter’?

It is essential to understand white balance because shooting with the incorrect setting can ruin your photos.

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.

What does white Balancing Do?

As the name suggests, white balance balances the color temperature in your image. How does it do this? It adds the opposite color to the image in an attempt to bring the color temperature back to neutral. Instead of whites appearing blue or orange, they should appear white after correctly white balancing an image. In simpler language, white balance in digital photography means adjusting colors so that the image looks more natural. 

Digital cameras are not that clever. They only try to guess the right color temperature. In digital photography, the settings on your camera and external lighting factors control the white balance.

There is huge potential for your images to look wrong when you get them up on the screen. But there is a system photographers use to get color right from the camera to the final image.

All light has a color which has a temperature. Different colors of light create different temperature hues in your image. The color temperature scale used for light is the Kelvin Scale. At the lower end of the scale, 2000-4000k shows warm light of reddish yellows. At around 5500k, the color is pretty much what we see at noon on a sunny day. As the scale climbs, the light gets progressively bluer. At about 10,000K we reach the very blue light of a typical flash gun.

Understanding White Balance in Photography

White balance is one of the most important yet less-considered settings of a camera when it comes to producing compelling images. A slight change towards a warmer or a cooler colour temperature can make all the difference between a dull image and one that is impressive.

We go through the process of adjusting colors to primarily get rid of color casts, in order to try to resemble the colors in our images with reality. The good news is, adjusting white balance is very easy. You can do it in your camera, as well as in post-processing software.

• In-Camera White Balance- Most cameras come with the option to manually set or adjust white balance. Typical settings include “sun”, “shade”, “tungsten” and “fluorescent”. Some cameras come with the option to manually set a color temperature by choosing a specific Kelvin value. 
• White Balance in Post-Processing Software- If you don’t want to worry about changing the white balance in your camera for different situations, as long as you are shooting RAW, you can always adjust the white balance of your images with post-processing software such as Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom. This is sometimes referred to as “color correction”. 

Changing WB in Camera vs In Post-Processing Software

One of the great things about digital photography is that we no longer have to use white cards and colour-cast removing filters in order to get accurate colours. If you shoot in RAW format, you can easily adjust the white balance in post-processing software later (that’s because the original RAW image does not contain any colours – they get added during the RAW conversion process). The original image stays untouched and unprocessed by the camera. This means that as long as you shoot in RAW, you can simply ignore the white balance setting.

But what if you do not use RAW and shoot JPEGs instead? Then you will need to learn how to adjust the white balance on your camera, since adjusting the white balance later can be quite damaging to the image, and you might never be able to get the colours right. Again, in most circumstances, your camera will do a good job of guessing the correct colour temperature, but there will be cases where the camera will be fooled by lighting conditions and give you bad colours. That’s when you will need to manually change it on your camera.

Since I always shoot in RAW, I set my camera to “Auto White Balance” most of the time and I let the camera guess what the correct WB should be. If my camera is unable to guess the correct white balance, I simply change it in post-processing software like Lightroom later, and I can copy-paste my desired values to as many pictures as I need. This is explained in more detail further down in the article. So if you have your camera set to shoot in RAW, simply set it to Auto White Balance and you are good to go! And this is only one of the advantages of shooting in RAW. You can read about others in my RAW vs JPEG article.

Conclusion

As you can see, white balance is an important tool for improving the quality of your images. It doesn't matter what style or genre of photography you prefer to practice; regulating the colour temperature of your images is crucial to communicate atmosphere and other visual aesthetics. By mastering the white balance in every situation, you'll take a big step towards creating more successful photographs. As with everything in life, it may take a bit of experience to fully understand how it works but you'll achieve outstanding results in no time!