Get creative with white balance

Try intentionally setting the ‘wrong’ white balance to introduce a colour cast and enhance the mood

A potential drawback of being able to neutralise any colour cast is that there’s a risk of sucking some of the life out of a picture. After all, the colour of the light may be what drew you to take the picture in the first place. But dialling a white balance preset that has a higher or lower colour temperature than the scene requires to display neutral whites can produce interesting results.

For example, as highlighted on the previous page, Auto White Balance can remove some of the heat from a shot taken at sunset or sunrise. You can fix this by choosing a preset that’s designed to warm up cooler scenes, such as Cloudy or Shade. Likewise, you can boost the cool tones of a shot taken at twilight by setting the Tungsten/ Incadescent preset.

By placing a ‘CTO’ warm-up gel (a piece of orange film) in front of a flash, you can create moody outdoor portraits in low light; the subject lit by the Tungsten-balanced flash will have a correct colour balance, while the background will have a strong blue cast. balance as just another tool in your creative photography arsenal.

Fine-tuning the colour temperature after you’ve taken a shot is much easier when you shoot raw. Raw files contain the raw, unprocessed information from the camera sensor; one of the advantages this offers is that you can later change the white balance in raw processing software like Camera Raw or Lightroom as if you were changing the setting on the camera. You can produce multiple versions of an image non-destructively, without risking any permanent changes to the original file, which leaves you free to refine the white balance for perfect colours, or to see the effect that more extreme colour temperatures and tints have.

As a raw file allows you to make a decision about the colour temperature after you’ve taken a shot, it might seem sensible to leave the camera set to Auto White Balance – it’s one less thing to have to think about, after all. But using one of the presets, creating a Custom setting or dialling in the Kelvin value gives you some consistency. If all the images in a sequence share the same setting, then batch-processing the files is much easier. There could be subtle colour temperature differences between each frame when AWB is used, and you’ll have to tweak each picture’s colours individually.

It might seem sensible to leave the camera set to Auto White Balance (AWB) – it’s one less thing to have to think about. But using one of the presets gives you some consistency for batchprocessing files

After with Cloudy preset

After with Tungsten preset

AWB has done a decent job (right), but using the Tungsten/ Fluorescent preset to add more blue to the image accentuates the coolness. Cool it down Before

Before Increase the heat The original image, right, was taken with Auto White Balance. But setting the Cloudy preset restores some of the fire of the original scene.