Change the white balance

Get drastically different colours in your photos fast by adjusting the white balance

Colour is an important part of photography and plays a substantial role in the mood of your images. Your camera’s white balance can make an image appear warmer or cooler to correct for colour casts and make sure that neutral hues in the shot, such as grey, look natural.

Most cameras are set to automatically determine the white balance, but in any of the semi-automatic or Manual modes you can select it, or even set your own custom value. This can be handy when you want consistent results in a series of images, like a time-lapse or a focus stack. We’d also highly recommend shooting raw format files, as this makes it much easier to change your white balance during editing. It’s also worth experimenting with your white balance when shooting for black-and-white, as the setting will also have an effect on the contrast of your mono tones.

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If you shoot in your camera’s raw format, you’ll get much more exposure information when you edit the shot later, making it a breeze to adjust exposure and white balance back at your computer. This is incredibly handy, and a near-impossible feat if you shoot lossy JPEGs. Bring your raw file into a raw editing program such as Lightroom or Photoshop CC’s Camera Raw plug-in and you can change the White Balance, either using presets or manually with the Temperature slider.