Week 7: Colour and White Balance

Whilst the naked eye automatically adjusts and adapts to different lights, cameras often do not do this as accurately. This is because they have a digital sensor which is affected by the colour casts in different lighting environments. Thus meaning that in order to achieve an accurate adjustment, the photographer must have some knowledge of White Balance. Doing so will impact the how the colours appear within the image. For example, this is particularly important when trying to achieve an accurate, natural and consistent colour balance in a series of photos.

Colour temperature is relative to hue, representing warm or cool colours and measured in Kelvin’s. However, as previously mentioned, sometimes cameras can be confused by certain kinds of light. Shade and incandescent are two of these light conditions.

Warm light: Incandescent/ tungsten
Cool light: Shade

It is best to shoot RAW, particularly if you aren’t confident with the white balance. However it is best to learn the white balance settings and get this correct in-camera. However, if anything needs editing or correcting, shooting RAW still gives you optimal flexibility later.

There are three white balance options: Auto white balance, white balance presets, manual/custom. Automatic usually suffices, however tungsten and shade will often need to be shot in a preset or manual white balance setting.

To ensure I understand the practicality of how my camera responds to these different kinds of light with the different white balance options, we completed an activity comparing them. We also used a grey card to help neutralise the lighting, however I have only developed my understanding of this in post-production.
Using the appropriate preset white balance function for each kind of lighting really highlights just how much the camera can change the colours of an image, particularly in photos of people. By matching the setting to the lighting, the result was often a more pleasant and natural looking image. This is something that I had not previously given any though to, opting to edit the image after the fact – however after this activity, my opinion is well and truely changed.

Full Sun/ Daylight