White Balance with cameras
At its simplest – the reason we adjust white balance is to get the colours in your images as accurate as possible.
Different digital cameras have different ways of adjusting white balance so ultimately you’ll need to get out your camera’s manual out to work out the specifics of how to make changes. Having said this – many digital cameras have automatic and semi-automatic modes to help you make the adjustments.
- Auto – this is where the camera makes a best guess on a shot by shot basis. You’ll find it works in many situations but it’s worth venturing out of it for trickier lighting.
- Tungsten – this mode is usually symbolized with a little bulb and is for shooting indoors, especially under tungsten (incandescent) lighting (such as bulb lighting). It generally cools down the colors in photos.
- Fluorescent – this compensates for the ‘cool’ light of fluorescent light and will warm up your shots.
- Daylight/Sunny – not all cameras have this setting because it sets things as fairly ‘normal’ white balance settings.
- Cloudy – this setting generally warms things up a touch more than ‘daylight’ mode.
- Flash – the flash of a camera can be quite a cool light so in Flash WB mode you’ll find it warms up your shots a touch.
- Shade – the light in shade is generally cooler (bluer) than shooting in direct sunlight so this mode will warm things up a little.
But on the other hand we used gels in order to manually change the white balance on some cameras. In order to this we would place the gel over the front of the camera (especially a blue and orange gel)and then set the white balance to focus. This would then cause the white balance to attempt to counter the change in colour. This lead to a orange gel to cause the image to become a lot more blue and give the image a cold feel, but on the other hand the opposite colour can be achieved with a blue gel as it causes a warm look to the image.
Example:
- James H
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