Take back control of white balance

Auto white balance may end up fixing things that aren’t broken, and adusting later in raw is not always a panacea, as Rod Lawton explains

Today’s digital camera users don’t know how lucky they are! Back in the days of film, you had to buy a film colour-balanced for ‘daylight’ and you just put up with whatever colour shifts occurred as the light changed. Pro studio photographers might switch to specialised ’tungsten’ balanced film, but that was about the extent of your choice.

But digital cameras work differently. Their sensors capture all colours equally, but they offer a variety of ‘white balance’ settings so that you can ‘rebalance’ the colour to suit the conditions.

What is white balance?

The name says it all, really. The camera’s white balance system balances the colours so that white is rendered as white, and not with a colour cast from different types of lighting.

This should give you correct, neutral colours whatever the conditions, so that you can use white balance to dial out the yellow/orange colour cast of artificial lighting, for example, or the cold tones of open shadow under a blue sky, or in the light of early dawn. Fixing the white balance fixes all the colours in the scene, in theory at least.

In the days of film, white balance was measured by ‘colour temperature’, which adjusts the colour balance along a red yellow-neutral-blue spectrum. That’s still the case with digital cameras, but these offer a secondary ‘tint’ setting with adjustments along a green-neutral-magenta scale. This does give more accurate colour correction, especially for more complex lighting spectrums like those from fluorescent light, for example, but also makes white balance values a little bit more complicated.