White Balance Settings

White balance is the term used in digital photography for capturing the correct balance of light, the human eye can correct white balance for all situations but a camera lens has a problem guessing sometimes.

In some shots you will see a bluish or orange tint which is caused by the camera guessing the wrong white balance. This is why it is important to use the correct white balance settings to capture the correct light.

DSLR Cameras have a range of pre-set modes in which you can choose the correct setting for the lighting conditions being used. You can choose from settings such as direct sunlight, cloudy, flourescent or tungsten light.

Most of the time using these pre-set white balance will do the trick but sometimes you need to tell the camera exactly what white looks like, to do this you can use a white or neural grey object or card and set the white balance by clicking on the white balance preset tab in your camera and by following the instructions you can take a snap of what white actually looks like in the current lighting conditions. This can dramatically change the colours in your shot and give you a more realistic and true to life image. Take a look at the photo's below, in the first photo the cat looks rather blue, this photo was taken in auto white balance mode. The second image was taken after pre-setting the white balance manually using a white object as described above and shows the cat as she really is.