Using Manual White Balance

PENSACOLA SUNSET 1

Earlier we asked our readers in the Your Photo Tips.com Flickr Group to give us some of their best one sentence photography tips and we had a great response! For the next few weeks I’ll be elaborating, in my own words, what those photo tips mean to me and how they can help you become a better photographer. So if you missed the original post you can find it at 16 Quick Tips For New Photographers.

Because this will be an ongoing series this will be where I tell you to bookmark the website or subscribe to our feed so you don’t miss the upcoming posts!

Using Manual White Balance

fabio offered this tip:

Set the white balance manually and learn the rule of thirds

For the latter part of his tip see Composition And The Rule Of Thirds.

For the first part of his tip keep reading.

Often times, as digital photographers, we rely too often on the camera to make decisions for us. Sometimes this is good, but mostly it can cause us to spend too much time in front of the computer instead of behind the lens. While I’m not opposed to post processing techniques to “fix”, enhance, or edit your images, I’ve always felt that the more you do in camera the less work you have afterwards.

There are options when it comes to white balance.

Auto White Balance
Manual White Balance includes:

• Preset White Balance
• Custom White Balance

All of these options have pros and cons. The type of photography that you engage in will most likely determine which ones you’ll use.

Auto White Balance

This is where most new photographers start. Truthfully the auto white balance settings (especially as cameras get smarter) tend to do a pretty good job (most of the time) provided your scenery has a good mix of color to begin with. The auto white balance can fail on you when there is an overabundance of one particular color in the frame. There are times (think Magic Hour) when auto white balance will totally kill your images. Basically the camera does it’s best to adjust for the color temperature in the surrounding area. So if the light is warm, like at sunset, then the camera will adjust by making the tones cooler. You don’t want that.

Is it okay to use auto white balance? Sure it is. Generally it’s okay to use that setting when your in situations where the light is changing often. If you’re on vacation and hitting many different locations, your in and out of buildings, or you’re just on the go. I still use it often if I’m pulling out the camera to try and grab a “timely” shot (like when my two year old comes running out of the bathroom with toilet paper hanging out of her panties, which is being saved in a folder marked “humiliating pictures to show to future suitors”).

Preset White Balance

The idea behind preset white balance is to give your camera a general idea of the temperature of your environment. These are the settings usually marked as tungsten, fluorescent, sunny, cloudy, etc. There are little icons in your settings area for the camera and you really should familiarize yourself with what they mean (read your camera manual). I use these very often. The general idea is that in a given situation of constant light temperature the camera won’t get fooled by bounced color. So if you’re at a your kiddo’s sports game and take a group picture after the game is over, the camera won’t adjust the color temperature because all the jerseys are blue.

This of course doesn’t work all of the time. It certainly is possible to find yourself in a situation where the color temperature of the room your in doesn’t match any of the presets. Then you get some really weird color shifts.

Custom White Balance

Here’s where your involvement before taking your first pictures will reduce image editing later on. With custom white balance you give yourself as much accuracy to color temperature as you can. This does require carrying a neutral gray or white balance card. Many can be bought online at very reasonable prices so fret not my friends.

There are two ways to use the custom white balance in your camera and this will be determined by how you capture your images; jpeg or raw.

• Jpeg – Take a picture of the gray card in the setting that you will be photographing in and use the in camera settings to adjust the white balance at that point. Every picture you take afterwards will contain that color setting so you’ll have consistent and accurate light.

• Raw – Take a picture of the gray card in the setting that you will be photographing in and just keep shooting (you don’t adjust settings in camera). When you get to the image editing stage all you’ll do is adjust for one image (the gray card image) then apply those settings to all images in that same environment. Presto.

Here’s what you have to remember. If you’re going the Jpeg route you’ll have to change the custom white balance every time your settings change, but if you’re shooting with raw all you’ll have to do is shoot an image of the gray card when your settings change.

A note about Raw

During Raw conversion you have the ability to adjust, with more control, the overall white balance or color temperature of the images in batches. If you happen to get a series of photographs wrong with one of the presets you have a second chance at fixing that during conversion. This is easily one of the biggest reasons to capture your images in raw format.

Photograph PENSACOLA SUNSET 1 by Hector G Lincz

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Related posts:

1. Why Photographers Love Magic Hour
2. David Pogue’s Digital Photography The Missing Manual [Book Review]
3. Q&A: What is RAW?
4. 4 Universal and Simple Steps to Multi-Shot Photography
5. When to Use Auto Exposure Mode