White Balance

Daylight	Shade	Cloudy
Tungsten	Fluorescent	Flash

Most photographic film is made to accurately record colours within a certain range of daylight. That means that in most conditions outside, a standard film will work well to make colours in an image appear as they did to the naked eye when they were taken. It is said that they faithfully record the colour.

If you take the same film and use it in different lighting conditions, you can get very different results. Pictures taken under normal incandescent bulbs often have a very warm, orange glow whereas pictures taken under fluorescent lights like those found in a kitchen appear cold and blue.

With film, shooting in these differing light conditions requires the use of the correct type of film to negate the colour cast (blue or orange) caused by the lighting.

With digital cameras, white balance is a feature that allows the camera to adapt for differing light sources to remove strong colour casts.

Most of the time an 'auto' white balance setting can be used. When in this mode the camera will make adjustments to the overall colour of an image to reduce the effect of lighting and make it appear more neutral.

Sometimes though, this auto feature can be fooled and not provide the desired result. In these situations, most cameras have preset white balance settings that can be used. These are generally classed as incandescent, fluorescent, flash, sunlight and cloudy. These presets can generally be relied upon to produce a good result when the auto function has failed.

With all this said though, there may be times when you actually want to retain the overall colour cast of the lighting for creative purposes. Shooting a portrait of someone illuminated by candlelight will produce a warm orange effect that will perhaps suit the skin tone and flatter the person whose photograph is being taken. However, applying an incandescent filter (usually displayed as a light bulb symbol) will remove all the atmosphere, ambience and mood from the shot that was trying to be created.

Some digital cameras (generally the higher end ones) enable you to set the colour temperature of the light. This is a more accurate method of achieving a neutral white balance, or indeed introducing a colour cast if so desired. A low colour temperature number will give a cold blue image, whereas a high colour temperature number will give a warm orange image. This can be used to good effect when taking photographs. In the autumn, oranges and reds seen in trees can be boosted by increasing the colour temperature slightly, while if the colour temperature is reduced, snow scenes or seascapes can be made to look cold and foreboding.

When shooting in the RAW file format, it is very easy to change the white balance of an image once you have taken it. White balance of images taken on a camera that uses the JPEG file format can still be changed, but this requires more processing in image manipulation software.

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