10. How to Take Photos 5: White Balance

White balance is a camera function that helps control, or balance, the hues of your subject. While the (midday) sun outdoors provides white light, most indoor or night lighting will be limited; it may be orange or yellow. Most shade lighting is blue. Scientists call this color temperature, and measure it in Kelvins:

Newer digital cameras have a setting for Automatic White Balance (AWB) which is what you want to use 99% of the time. It does a good job of correcting for current lighting conditions, and most important, it checks the lighting every time you take a photo. If you ever notice your colors look really strange, the most likely culprit is that your white balance setting got switched accidentally to some crazy filter. Just set it back to AWB, and it should be fine.

Every once in awhile, AWB can get confused, if two different kinds of light are present at once. If this happens, and you don’t like the colors in your view screen, then you can try any of the other white balance settings, to see if they look better. Or, you can select “Custom White Balance” – then take a photo of something white, and it’ll use that as a reference for all your colors. This is a situation where it would pay to carry a white card with you. Also remember, you can always play with the colors and hues in post production. Programs like Light Room make it easy to correct the white balance, either for the whole image, or select parts of it.