Camera College
Remove colour casts from your images – or introduce them for creative effect – by getting to grips with your camera’s white balance controls
Take the why out of white balance
When the colours in a picture don’t look right, it’s probably down to the camera’s white balance setting. Different sources of light have different colour temperatures, measured in degrees Kelvin, with candles and tungsten light bulbs having a warm yellow glow and a blue sky giving off a cooler light. Some artificial lighting can be tinged with green or magenta.
Our eyes adjust to these changes in colour temperature – or rather, our brain does. Although we can see that a candle gives off a warm light and there’s a cool blue look to shade on a sunny day, we know that a white subject being lit by each type of light is still white. But your camera doesn’t know this. Instead, it will record a white subject as orange when it’s illuminated by a candle and blue when it’s in shade – or it would do, if it wasn’t for the white balance controls. These enable you to tell the camera the colour temperature of the light, so that you can get accurate colours in your pictures.
Some cameras have a dedicated WB button: press this and rotate the camera’s main dial to scroll through the options shown on the camera’s display. Alternatively, you can find the White Balance menu on the rear control screen and in your camera’s main menu.
The White Balance menu consists of an automatic setting (typically displayed as