What is White Balance?
Many people wonder what white balance is and why it’s so important in photography. White balance, or WB for short, is the measure of how warm or cool a colour appears to your eye. Warm colours like orange, yellow and red make an image feel warmer while cooler colours such as blue and green tend to have a more calming effect on viewers.
What is white balance?
The light at different times of the day or from difference light sources can change how an object appears. When you look at something, your eyes will always see it as white because they are much better than a camera in processing colour temperature differences – which is why cameras use White Balance to remove any unwanted colours and make sure everything looks correct.
What is colour temperature?
Colour temperature is a scale that measures how ‘warm’ (yellow) or ‘cool’ (blue) the light from a particular source is. It is measured in Kelvins (abbreviated to K), and the higher the number, the ‘cooler’ (bluer) the light. The lower the ‘K’ number, the ‘warmer’ (yellow) the light.
Colour Temperature of Different Light Sources
Every light source has its own colour temperature that you need to account for.
How to Adjust White Balance?
There are essentially two ways of adjusting the white balance in your images – in-camera and in post-processing.
Setting white balance In-Camera:
Most digital cameras have the following white balance settings: Auto (A), and then, from warm to cool, Tungsten (light-bulb symbol), Fluorescent (symbol resembling a light tube), Daylight (sun symbol), Shade (a house casting a shadow symbol), Cloudy (cloud symbol), Flash (lightning-bolt symbol), or Manual/Preset where you choose the kelvin value you want.Your white balance setting can be accessed either in your camera’s menu system or using a dedicated button labeled “WB” on your camera’s body.
How to use a grey card for white balance
A grey card is a hue-neutral card used to calibrate the white balance in a digital camera. Digital cameras’ auto white balance (AWB) systems can have trouble estimating accurate colours for scenes with multiple light sources such as mixed tungsten and fluorescent lighting, or where much of the scene is illuminated by an incandescent source of light that is off from the side. By using a grey card you can accurately set the white balance to something neutral.
A grey card can be used in other photographic situations where a colour cast needs to be removed from an image, such as when photographing white clothing against a dark or light background.
How to fix white balance in Lightroom
To fix your white balance in Adobe’s Lightroom you click on the white balance drop down menu, selecting “as shot” if you are still in raw. You can then tweak your white balance settings by sliding or selecting a preset like “Auto” until you see the image as how it should be. You’ll be surprise how well this works in most cases.
How to correct white balance in photoshop
In Adobe’s Photoshop you’ll need to select the white balance tool under “colour”. You can then click in on a neutral colour and select your white balance.
To fix white balance with photoshop you’ll need to make sure that your images are unclipped and that you select the white balance tool under “colour”. Next, click in on a neutral colour and then adjust until your image looks like it should.
To fix white balance with photoshop you’ll need to make sure that your images are unclipped and that you select the white balance tool under “colour”. You will next want to get rid of any orange or yellow tints by clicking on one spot on those colours. Finally, zoom into an area where there is green so you can edit for those colours too if they’re needed.
The best way to correct white balance in Photoshop is through adjusting levels using curves because this gives more control over what parts of the photo have been adjusted as well as the parts you still need to work on.
If you are using a mobile device, or another editing program such as Lightroom, the method is different but not necessarily any more difficult because many of these programs have similar settings for white balance.
Remember this can be done on mobile’s or tablets using adobe apps.
The article has provided a lot of information about how to choose and set your white balance, as well as some helpful tips for correcting the white in edit. If you’re looking for even more tutorials on photography or video editing basics, subscribe below!
