Strategic White Balance

White balance is one of the least understood aspects of photography. It is also the topic for the week in the Boost Your Photography: 52 Weeks Challenge. (Join the Google+ Community to share your weekly photographs and receive feedback.)

 Many of us simply rely on Auto White Balance or shot RAW images and fix the white balance in post-processing. For an introduction to white balance first read What the ... White Balance? , one of the most popular and most pinned posts on Boost Your Photography. White balance can be a powerful photographic tool when used strategically.

White Balance and Color

White light is made up of the entire spectrum of light (visible and invisible). Our eyes can readily adjust to changing lighting situations so that our brain generally always "sees" a white piece of paper as white, whether we are looking at it outside in full sun, under a tree in the shade, or indoors under a fluorescent light panel. A camera, however, is not so talented, which is why your photographs can have different color casts depending on the lighting and the white balance used.

This chart from Life in Edit by Esmer Olvera provides a great visualization of the different colors and temperatures of common light sources. The article also does a really nice job of laying out the step-by-step process of creating a custom white balance for a given scene. (This is particularly useful if you are going to be shooting a large number of shots under the same lighting conditions, like in portraiture or product photography work.)

As you can see from the chart, shade has blue-ish tones, which is why white snow can look blue when photographed in the shade. Indoor lighting has yellow-ish tones, which is why white walls often look old and yellowed when photographed using only artificial indoor lighting. The deep blues of Twilight give the Blue Hour its name, while the deep yellows and oranges give the Golden Hour around sunrise and sunset its name.

Using White Balance Strategically

Now that you have a general idea of what colors and tones different lighting situations can impart, you can start thinking about how to use white balance strategically.

The first way, of course, is to use white balance to "correct" the colors in your photograph. If you want your indoor white walls to appear white, consider using the fluorescent white balance setting. If you are shooting in full shade and do not want blue snow, consider using the shade white balance setting. The chart below from Digital Camera World provides a fuller description of each white balance preset in your camera and some situations where each comes in handy.

Now, the second way to use white balance strategically is to use it for creative effect. Are you shooting in the middle of the day but wish you could capture that warm glow of a Golden Hour setting sun? Try shooting in Cloudy or Shade. (In one of the first landscape photography books I read, the authors shared that they shoot all of their landscape and nature shots on Cloudy white balance for a warmer look.) You can see an example of such a difference below.

Shooting just after sunset but the sky has not yet gotten the deep blue tones of the Blue Hour? Try shooting in Tungsten white balance, which will emphasize the blue tones you are looking for. The two versions below are from the exact same shot - using the RAW file to show the difference between Auto and Tungsten white balance for twilight shots.

Strategic White Balance

Take the next step in using white balance. Spend some time evaluating your scene and deciding which white balance makes the most sense - whether to remove color casts or to add them creatively. Worried about making a mistake? Shoot in RAW, and you can adjust your white balance all you want in post-processing without losing any image quality.

(Looking to grow more in your photography? Consider joining the BYP 52 Weeks Google+ Community to share your weekly photograph and see what others are capturing.)

What the ... White Balance?

White balance is an often-overlooked aspect of photography. Many, many of us are guilty of simply adopting a "set it and forget it" approach to white balance, relying on auto white balance and our camera's ability to interpret a scene and choose an appropriate white balance. For many situations, your camera's auto white balance will do a decent job. But if you really want full creative control over your photograph, it is important to understand white balance and how to use it to truly capture the photograph that you are after.

What is White Balance?

We tend to think of light as white, even though we have all seen the science demonstration of a prism and how white light is actually the full rainbow of colors. Our eyes look at a white piece of paper, and we see it as white, whether we are standing outside in full sun, in dappled shade, or indoors under fluorescent tube lights. Our cameras, however, are less flexible.

If you take a photograph of a white piece of paper, you may find that it looks white in daylight, blue in the shade, and yellow indoors. This difference is referred to the 'color temperature' of the light, and it is measured in K or Kelvins. If you want the whites in your photograph to look white, then you need to shoot with a white balance that matches the situation of the photograph.

Canon has several different white balance options, other than Auto: Daylight (5200K), Cloudy (6000K), Shade (7000K), Tungsten (3200K), Fluorecent (4000K), Flash, and Custom. The photograph above demonstrates what each of these different white balance options look like for a single photograph.

(Quick aside: if you shoot in JPEG, white balance is an unchangeable part of the final image file. If you shoot in RAW, however, the RAW file contains information that allows you to use software, like Photoshop, to change the white balance in post-processing, while still maintaining all the original information recorded for the photograph. The sunset photograph above is a composite of all the white balance options from a single RAW file.)

Cloudy white balance works well for sunset shots.

The cloudy and shade white balance settings are considered "warmer" than daylight or tungsten, which means that they tend to bring out more orange and yellow tones in a photograph. Cloudy and shade settings can work extremely well during the 'Golden Hour,' the approximately hour-long period before-and-after sunrise and sunset, when the sun rays lend a much more golden tone to the morning or evening light. The cloudy setting is also popular with landscape photographs, as it can add a golden tone to non-golden hour photographs. Read a few landscape photography books, and you will find that many well-known landscape photographers use cloudy as their default white balance setting.

Indoor White Balance

White balance can also make a huge difference with your indoor photographs. Common sources of indoor lighting (halogens, compact fluorescents, etc.) do not contain the full spectrum of white light, like sunlight, and often impart an awkward yellow tone to indoor photographs. Knowing the type of lighting you are using allows you to choose an appropriate white balance setting, like fluorescent, to compensate for this issue.

Get the how to on this shot: Fizzy Photography

Think about the lighting for the particular scene you are photographing, and consider changing your white balance to match the scene at hand. Shooting indoors? Consider fluorescent. Using your on-camera flash? Consider flash. Shooting a sunrise, sunset, or other scene with golden tones? Consider cloudy or shade. Better yet? Consider shooting in RAW and adjusting your white balance to your preference.

Want to get your white balance exact? You can use a gray card to set the white balance manually. If there is enough interest, you can expect a future post on the topic of custom white balances.

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