White Balance essay

White balance is in it’s essence a control for the temperature of the photo. The temperature then controls how the color spectrum shows up in your image.  The hotter the setting the more yellowish and red the image will look. The colder the setting the more blue and turquoise shades will creep in.  Most cameras come with an automatic white balance option. I’ve found this to be a rather reliable way of capturing the white balance in all of my images. Another way in which to always have a foolproof fall back option is to always shooting your images in RAW. This allows you to change the white balance in post processing. So even if you mis gauged the proper setting for the location you are at it still gives you the peace of mind of knowing you can go back and change it at a later time. As you will see in my photos this is HUGE.

                Another function of my camera, and I believe of most DSLRs is the ability to set a custom white balance. Sometimes the auto settings just won’t cut it when you are in a room with many conflicting lights. For instance in my wife’s dance studio there can be an array of florescent bulbs, natural light coming through the large windows and some incandescent bulbs that are set up for mood lighting. This can make capturing a proper white balance nearly impossible for my camera on it’s own. Nearly all of my pictures come out looking jaundiced using a preset setting on my camera. They are always a bit warmer and therefore more yellow than I would like because of the mixture of light. What I’ve found to do is set a custom white balance in these situations. To do this one only needs a simple white piece of paper. Take a photo of it in the light you will be shooting in. Then go to your custom white balance setting and click on that photo. It will select the white from that picture as your white balance until you take it out of the custom preset. This allows you to get the correct colors for all of your images in that space up until you change the setting back to a preset or to auto mode.

                White balance controls the color spectrum you see when viewing your photographs. If you are set to the wrong preset, or your camera does a poor job of detecting the white balance I’ve found that the images will tend to be discolored quite a bit, almost as if someone layered a blue or yellow sheet behind your photo in Photoshop.  It makes the image seem tinted, which makes for poor quality images. 

As I said above, when shooting in raw however this can be altered after the fact.  In Photoshop for instance when loading a raw image the top section has two sliding scales along with it’s own presets for the type of environment that you are in. If you are unable to nail the coloring using these options it also affords you the ability to use the eyedropper tool to select a white portion of the photo and it will automatically tune the color balance properly from there.