Digital Camera Master

Many digital cameras come with a control for something called white balance. White balance is important because different light sources have different color temperatures, meaning that a scene will appear to have a slightly different color tone depending upon how it is illuminated.

You have probably noticed this yourself without really even paying attention. You may have seen, for instance, that ordinary light bulbs appear more yellow than the light that streams in from outdoors. And other sources—like candlelight and fluorescent lighting—are certainly a very different color than sunlight.

Photographers and scientists have gone to the trouble of cataloging the different color temperatures exhibited by various light sources. Higher temperatures appear warm, or slightly reddish, while cooler light sources tend to add a blue tone to your pictures. It’s not at all unlike the way a flame has different colors at its outside and center. Why? Because those different parts of the flame are different temperatures.

As a point of comparison, the following info shows the color temperatures of several common light sources:

Source Color –> Temperature (Degrees Kelvin)
Candlelight –> 2000
Sunset –> 3000
Tungsten light –> 3200
Fluorescent light –> 5000
Daylight –> 5500
Camera flash –> 5600

If your camera is balanced for one kind of light source (daylight, for instance) and you photograph a scene that has been illuminated by a very different temperature of light (such as tungsten), the resulting image won’t reflect the true colors in the scene. What should be white will turn out looking somewhat reddish. Ordinarily, we don’t notice this ourselves because, as I’ve said before, the human brain is very good at interpreting what the eyes see. Our brain adjusts for different color temperatures so that white almost always looks white, no matter what color light we’re seeing it in. Of course, cameras aren’t quite that smart. And that’s why we need a white balance adjustment.

The white balance setting on your camera allows you to specify exactly what the color temperature of the scene is. In most cases, your camera can automatically adjust to conditions. If need be, however, you can do it yourself. You’ll know that you need to adjust the white balance if your pictures routinely come out shifted to the blue or red end of the spectrum. If your whites are not white—in other words, your camera doesn’t do a good job of correcting the white balance—then you need to do it yourself.

If you get in the habit of manually adjusting the white balance, remember to reset the white balance to auto when you are done with each shoot. Otherwise, you might forget that your camera is balanced for fluorescent light when you shoot outdoors, and you’ll get very funky results.