How to manage your white balance

If you want to know more about white balance, you can refer to the article on Introduction to white balance. Most lighting condition has a colour temperature, ranging from warm where the colour cast is orange to cool where the colour cast is blue. Our eyes are well adapted to the lighting condition and we do not notice the difference in colour but for the camera, because the camera in-built intelligence may not be able to accurate tell the different lighting condition, thus you will have to choose the preset white balance or you will have to set manually the correct white balance. Most people will use auto white balance as it is convenient to let the camera set the white balance used. However, there are downsides where the auto white balance will fail.


Camera preset white balance and their approximate colour temperature
1. Your auto white balance will fail if it does not know where the light source is. This is because most light are reflected by the light source and the light source may not even be in the scene. The camera does not know what colour the light source in order to select the best colour temperature to compensate the light source.

2. If the light source is mixed (e.g tungsten and fluorescent), the camera will not be able to tell which colour will render accurately and may take both lighting into account and average it. In this case, you may want to choose different white balance to see which white balance will determine the correct colour.

3. When the subject’s unique properties will fool the camera’s intelligence into thinking it has abundance of warmness or coolness in it.

There are ways to correct if your auto white balance fails to choose the correct white balance. These are the following methods available:

1. Use preset white balance
There is a lot of preset white balance available in a digital camera. For example, if you encounter tungsten lighting, you will need to set your white balance to tungsten to compensate for the orange that tungsten is giving.

2. Shoot in RAW
Shooting in RAW will allow you to adjust your white balance in photoshop as RAW preserves the settings from the raw data. In this way, you do not need to worry about what white balance you set in your camera as you have the luxury to manually set your white balance when you work with your pictures in the photoshop.

3. Customise your white balance
If your camera allows you to customise your white balance, you can use it to set the lighting condition used in the shoot. Customising your white balance will allow you to either compromise and go for the overall average white balance, in which individual near-neutral colours may be askew, but the overall impression seems balanced to the eyes or select which colour in frame you want to make neutral, and allow the other colours to shift accordingly.

Note: The left one was shoot at auto white balance setting and the right one was shot at daylight setting. Notice how different white balance can affect the mood as well as the colour of the picture.

Hope this article in showing you how to correct your pictures using the appropriate white balance.