White Balance and Color Temperature

White Balance and Color Temperature

White balance is the process of removing color casts from your image so that white objects appear white. Different light sources have different color temperatures. A candle flame is very warm orange, around 1800 Kelvin. A cloudy sky is cool blue, around 6500 Kelvin. The human eye automatically adjusts for these differences, so a white sheet of paper looks white under both candlelight and fluorescent light. Cameras need to be told what the light source is to reproduce colors accurately.

Your camera has white balance presets for common situations. Daylight is around 5500K and is neutral. Shade is around 7000K and adds warmth to compensate for the cool blue light in shaded areas. Cloudy is similar but slightly warmer. Tungsten is around 3200K and cools down the warm orange light of household bulbs. Fluorescent corrects for the greenish cast of tube lights. Auto white balance usually does a good job in mixed lighting but can be fooled by strongly colored scenes.

Setting white balance manually gives you consistent results. If you are shooting in a studio with controlled lighting, set white balance to the appropriate Kelvin value or use a gray card to set a custom white balance. A gray card is a neutral reference that you photograph once, and then the camera uses that reference for all subsequent shots. This ensures every image in the same lighting has identical white balance, which is essential for product photography and consistent portfolios.

White balance can also be used creatively. Warming up an image by setting a higher Kelvin value than the actual light gives a golden, nostalgic feel. Cooling down an image creates a cold, clinical atmosphere. Portrait photographers often warm skin tones slightly for a more flattering look. Landscape photographers might cool down a scene to emphasize the blue in a mountain lake. The key is knowing what the correct white balance is so you can intentionally deviate from it.

If you shoot in raw, white balance is not applied to the file. It is stored as metadata that your editing software reads as the default. You can change it to any value without any loss of quality. This is one of the biggest advantages of raw. A portrait shot under tungsten light with incorrect white balance can be perfectly corrected in post because the raw file contains all the color information needed. With JPEG, incorrect white balance can be difficult or impossible to fix cleanly.