White Balance

White Balance

So why some scenes seem a little to orange? Or at least more orange than you would expect in real life.

And why do some pictures seem a little to blue, more blue than reality? The camera is set to “indoor white balance” in an outdoor environment!

Well we have these image problems because our white balance is set incorrect. White balance refers to what our camera considers to be white.

Most cameras have white balance preset switches for indoor white balance and day light white balance.  That’s because what we see as white light from the sun is different than what we perceive being white light from tungsten or indoor light bulbs.

We are not going to get to scientific here, but just to illustrate the difference, the color temperature of sun light is 5600 degrees Kelvin and the color of your typical tungsten light is 3200 degrees Kelvin.

“Light bulbs are “tungsten” light sources”

This room looks wrong because we are using a sunlight light balance for indoor tungsten lighting. This is how it should look with the correct white balance.

Everything here looks to blue because we are using an indoor white balance setting outdoors in the sun light. This is how it should look with the correct white balance.

OK, so here’s a pop quiz. What white balance setting would you use for this location? I may be indoors but I have a lot of sunlight coming through this window, would you use the indoor white balance setting or the outdoor white balance setting?

OK so that was actually that was a trick question. I should have asked do you use the tungsten indoor white balance setting or the daylight outdoor white balance setting? Even though I’m inside the majority of this room is lite up by day light. If you use the tungsten setting it would look like this….which for us is a little too blue.

As with focusing we recommend you set your white balance manually rather than relying on the automatic preset buttons. That way you’ll be more accurate, and you’ll set your white balance to your particular environment.

In order to set your white balance manually all you need is a white card or a white piece of paper. Zoom all the way into that white card so the white completely fills the screen then typically you’ll press your white balance button until the white balance symbol stops blinking, then you can zoom out and your image should be correctly white balanced.

If you don’t have a card or a piece of paper, you can use anything pure white, like a t-shirt or a white wall, or you can even white balance off my pasty white skin…no no we can’t show that that’s to white.

We have to admit sometime automatic white balance can be advantageous, for example when we are moving from an area outdoors indoors or vise versa, in this case we don’t have automatic white balance on, so when I’m moving outdoors to indoors the image looks to orange inside, because the camera hasn’t adjusted.

So now automatic white balance is selected, so the automatic white balance should adjust when I move outdoors indoors…. doesn’t look so orange now does it? Of course I don’t have a problem with anything orange.

You should reset you white balance

Everytime you change lighting environments.