8 GO HOT OR COLD WITH WHITE BALANCE
How to achieve perfect colours in your images every time
White Balance a ects how ‘warm’ or ‘cool’ an image looks by changing its Kelvin value. A lower value, such as the Tungsten preset of 4000K, will produce much bluer tones and a colder-looking image, while a higher value, such as the Shade preset at 7500K, produces much warmer images.
The goal of white balance is to achieve a natural-looking and well-balanced range of tones, so when shooting in cooler shady spots and working in Auto White Balance mode, the camera will boost the Kelvin value to compensate for this. But you can adjust the White Balance in-camera or at the editing stage to make images look warmer or cooler depending on what you’re looking to achieve artistically with the photo. In Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic, you also have access to a Tint slider, though this is mainly to correct for purple and green colour casts you might get when shooting with lters.
The White Balance can be set to a range of presets in-camera, though you can also experiment with custom values, too, such as using a White Balance Shift/Bracket mode on some premium cameras to make images more Red, Green, Blue or Magenta. Many cameras also o er the option to set the White Balance from a reference image; typically a grey card is placed in the scene you wish to photograph and this is shot and referenced. The grey card can then be removed when you begin shooting.
Your camera’s White Balance a
ects how ‘warm’ or ‘cool’ its colours appear and can also be set when editing your raw le, too. Here, you can see the di
erence between a cool white balance of 4000K (left) compared to a much warmer 6000K (right).