Produce accurate colours

Counteract colour casts and tints caused by different colour temperature light sources

Occasionally a photograph might suffer from a blue colour cast, making the subject look cold.

Alternatively the colours may be too warm, causing skin tones to look orange. These colour-related problems occur because different light sources produce different colour temperatures. To put it simply, daylight can add a blue colour cast, while indoor light can add a wash of orange. The colour temperature of daylight also changes due to the time of day and with varying weather conditions.

When your camera is set to Auto White Balance (AWB), it looks for objects that should be white (or a neutral grey). If these areas have a cold colour cast, the camera warms them up to create a tint-free white. This will also create tint-free colours in the rest of the scene. If the whites feature a warm colour cast then the camera will cool them down until they are neutral, cooling down all the colours in the frame in the process. As the AWB mode doesn’t always get it spot on, you can give your camera a helping hand and set its white balance mode to an appropriate preset, such as Tungsten or Shade.

If you shoot in Raw quality mode then you can easily correct colour casts in Digital Photo Professional 4. It boasts the same manual and automatic white balance presets as your camera, so you can experiment with different settings in a few clicks to get the correct white balance.

You can also perform custom white balance operations to ensure that your images show their true colours every time, whatever the weather or light source.