White Balance Introduction
If you have a digital camera, of course you will see of the white balance.Have you ever taken a picture of a beautiful winter scene and been disappointed to discover the crisp, white snow came out with a bluish tint? This is the kind of situation your digital camera’s white balance is meant to prevent.
White Balance is an aspect of photography that many digital camera owners don’t understand or use, but it’s something well worth learning about as it can have a real impact upon the shots you take.
The white balance is a sensor that analyzes the lighting conditions and colors of a scene and adjusts so the white in the picture appears white. This helps insure the other colors appear as natural as possible. This is one advantage digital photography has over tradition film. With film, you buy with a certain lighting condition in mind. If that changes, you need to either change your film or hope you can fix any errors in post-production.
Your camera’s white balance control helps you to make sure that things that are supposed to be white actually look white in your final image. Different sources of light create different colour ‘casts’ – for instance, candlelight creates an orange glow, whereas twilight can give everything a cool, blue hue.
Most digital cameras allow you to use either automatic white balance or choose between several preset conditions such as full sun, cloudy day and so forth. Automatic white balance will work in most conditions. There may be times, however when you want to “warm” up a picture to enhance the color, such as for portraits or sunsets. The best way to do this is set your camera’s white balance to “cloudy”. This will deepen the colors and add a glowing quality to portraits. It will take a beautiful sunset and enhance it to the point of incredible.
Practice taking the same photo with different white balance settings to get a feel for the changes each setting evokes. Keep notes until you have a good idea of what each setting does. In time, you will come to automatically sense which setting is best for your particular situation.
7 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.
White Balance Manual Adjustments
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.
Manual adjustment is not difficult to do once you find where to do it in the menu on your camera and it’s well worth learning how to do it.
With White Balance Features You will no longer have to worry about faded sunsets or blue snow. White balance is a small setting that can make big changes in your finished photos
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