Balancing Act

What The Hell Is White Balance?

I’ve owned several digital cameras in my life and have seen the term ‘white balance’ on my display, but never made any move to find out what it is or what it can do to my photos. Until now.

White balance settings change the colour balance of a photo, aiming to remove unrealistic colours and make white appear white. It takes into account the temperature of the light you’re shooting in, making your photos warmer or cooler accordingly.

My camera has several white balance modes for different types of light; Auto, Sunny/Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Tungsten (normal light-bulb), Florescent and Flash. When taking a photo on a cloudy day, the light is cooler so using the Cloudy setting will compensate by warming the colours of the photograph. When taking a photo under a Tungsten bulb, the light is warmer so using the Tungsten setting will compensate by cooling the colours. This should produce more realistic results.

The below photos of Clevedon seafront were taken using Sunny, Cloudy, Tungsten and Florescent settings. You can see the difference in the colours:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The Cloudy setting (2nd image) has given the most realistic result, although Sunny (1st image) isn’t far off – probably because the weather was both sunny and cloudy! You can see that the photo taken using the Cloudy setting is slightly warmer.

Of course you may not always want the most realistic colours. Please check out my photos below where I have used a range of white balance settings with different results – some realistic, some less so!