photography: 5 - white balancing

We see the world in many different tints of light

The problem is that our brains adjust what we see to filter out these tints, so we are often unaware that they exist at all...

Consider a summer’s day: We might have a red dawn glow to begin

with… By noon, when the sun is high, we have

bright yellow… It might rain later, softening the light

through grey clouds… Before returning to a red sunset...

Things get more complex when we add artificial lighting (light bulbs, etc...) into the mix:

The reason that pictures have an orange tint with light bulbs and blue with fluorescent lights is because different lights have different colour temperatures

This is a huge topic – for now just accept that different lighting gives off different tints

And all the time our brain is ‘adjusting’ our perception of these changing tints:

Unfortunately a camera is not as clever as our brains

It has no idea what colour light it is filming in (despite advances in automatic sensors). This usually produces some pretty horrendous tints

Therefore you need to tell your camera what tint of light it is filming in

This is known as White Balancing

White Balance works on the fact that all colours can be produced from pure white light (think of Newton and his prisms):

Pure White Light...

...can be split into a rainbow of colours

(With apologies to Pink Floyd!)

So if we tell a camera what white looks like in a given light, it can work out what every other colour should look like. This produces accurate colours, especially natural skin tones:

The Golden Rule:

White Balancing is dead easy to do and must be done at every new location

At the very least use Auto or one of the preset modes

Simply find the Manual White Balance control on your camera (but don’t press it yet). Then get somebody to hold up a sheet of white paper:

Camera

White Card

Zoom in so that the white paper completely fills the screen:

...then press the Manual White Balance button or whatever option your camera has

The biggest problem you will face is finding the White Balance control

Every camera has a different way of setting the White Balance – some have buttons, some use an on-screen menu, and some set the WB at the moment they are switched on! Good Luck!