White Balance
In the digital world, white balance is the term used to describe the ways to account for colour shifts in photographs. What is a colour shift? Have you ever taken a picture under florescent lights and have then come back green? That is a colour shift caused by the temperature of the lighting.
| Colour Temperature | Light Source |
| 1000-2000K | Candlelight |
| 2500-3500 K | Tungsten Bulb |
| 3000-4000K | Sunrise/ Sunset (clear sky) |
| 4000-5000K | Fluorescent Lamps |
| 5000-5500 K | Electronic Flash (these have the whitest light) |
| 5000 – 6500 K | Daylight with Clear Sky (sun overhead) |
| 6500-8000 K | Moderately Overcast Sky |
| 9000-1000 K | Shade or Heavily Overcast Sky |
Using a grey care, you can customize your white balance to any situation. But really, why bother? The presets on your camera work extremely well. Also, auto, which is based on algorithms, is a fantastic thing. I personally only shoot on auto. I still get colour shifts but I correct them later in Lightroom and Photoshop. Auto doesn’t work very well if you have a majority of one colour in the shot. If you have all red leaves for example, the camera thinks that there is a warm colour shift and will introduce cyan to compensate. This might be a good time to use your custom white balance tool but overall, the presets are the way to go. In another lesson I will show you how to use custom.
Colours
This is a good time to dispel a myth perpetrated by the primary school system. The primary colours of light are RED, BLUE and GREEN. Yes, it’s true. Yellow is only a primary colour in pigments (i.e. Paint). The colours of ink when printing are MAGENTA, YELLOW (amber) and CYAN. The colour system of light looks like the following diagram.
All these mixed together make white light. White balance used to be achieved by figuring out what colour the light is and putting a filter on your camera to compensate. For example, in fluorescent light, the colour is green. To compensate you would put a magenta filter on. This is what your preset white balance for fluorescent is doing. But maybe you want a colour shift. I love pictures with a warm tungsten amber glow. It’s all about how you look at it. Just don’t let people have a blue cast to them. Tends to make them look corpsey.
S.
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