Color Cast in Film – White Balance before Digital
Before digital photography, film really only came in two flavors. Daylight balanced, and Tungsten balanced. Daylight film was for “normal” light that you would encounter outdoors. Tungsten was a closer match to most indoor lights. Each of these light sources has a different color “temperature” and using the wrong film for the light source gave you a color cast or tint that you didn’t really want in many cases. To compensate, you used filters. You can read more on photographic filters at wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographic_filter#Color_conversion) if you want, but that is a little outside the scope of this article.
White Balance in Digital Photography
With most, if not all of, today’s cameras, you can select the color balance of your choice when you are taking your pictures. You don’t need to use a corrective filter. You also have many more choices than just Daylight and Tungsten. And you can see the results immediately after taking your photos. With the Auto White Balance settings on most cameras, which does a pretty good job in most situations, most people even forget this setting even exists. I really don’t think about it a lot myself most days, but notice times when my camera is picking something slightly off from Daylight when I’m outside, and my photos are not getting the most favorable color cast. So there are times when I force the camera to Daylight, or possibly to the Shade setting to make sure it’s doing what I want it to.
Shooting Raw and Setting White Balance in Post
If you have your camera set to save RAW format images when you shoot, you can change the white balance setting on your computer later when you process the RAW files. This is one of the reasons I like the RAW format. You can make some subtle changes to your images later, because what you have in the raw file is the original unprocessed data captured by the sensor when you pressed the shutter release. JPG’s have the result of what the software in the camera processed from this data, but the RAW file leaves decisions up to you rather than making them for you.
Examples of White Balance Settings
I shot some example images to illustrate the difference between the settings. These images were all shot together, in direct sunlight on a mostly sunny day. So the “normal” shot should be the one using the Daylight setting. You will see that the Cloudy Sky, and Shade settings each get a slightly warmer hue to them. This is because a cloudy sky will give a slightly colder hue (a little more blue) than a sunny sky, and shade will be slightly colder than the cloudy sky. The white balance settings for these light sources will “warm” the light in the image to compensate. The difference between these images isn’t drastic.
Now look at the one for indoor lighting. That one is very different, with a noticeable blue cast to it. This compensates for indoor lighting that is quite different from the natural outdoor lighting on a sunny day. Most cameras will also have both a “regular” indoor and a fluorescent indoor light setting on them, because fluorescent lights are a bit different that other light sources.
Just remember, in most cases, the auto white balance setting will take care of this for you. But it’s making assumptions based on the scene in the viewfinder that may or may not be correct. So if you watch your image results in the viewfinder, and they aren’t what you want, you should be able to change the setting and correct it. Or, if you’re shooting in RAW, change it when you bring your images into your computer software for editing.
Getting Creative
Now that you understand how to correctly set your white balance, how can you use this setting to add some creative or dramatic effects to your images? Here are 5 great examples of how to alter outdoor photos by changing your white balance setting in your camera (or in post) by professional landscape photographer Ian Plant.
Creative Use of White Balance – Ian Plant