It’s been a while since I wrote one of these but this is something I’ve come to appreciate a lot recently, a lot over the last year and even more so in the last couple months.
Namely, White Balance.
But what is white balance?
White balance is the adjustment made to your sensor to correctly detect the colours in a scene, relative to the white. This basically means setting a standard for every type of light so it can detect variations from that standard and assign the appropriate colours to them.
For the most part, modern cameras do this automatically and usually quite well, but the catch is in the word usually. They don’t always get it right. On the plus side white balance is very easy to set manually and also pretty easily changed in post-processing.
Knowing how to fix your white balance in the moment can be very useful though, it’ll allow you to get a more accurate representation of the colours in the scene and tends to create an overall more pleasing image.
I had the good fortune of shooting with a Leica M10 recently and while it was wholly impressive, the one thing that stood out for me was how much better the camera was at auto-selecting white balance for scenes compared to my Fujis, this made images straight out of camera look a lot punchier and the colours very realistic.
So enough talking, let’s take a look at some examples and also discuss when and how to preset your white balance.
This is the image that inspired this blogs title. This is what I got straight out of the camera and in my opinion it makes the scene look very dull and blue.
With just simple white balance adjustment by using the snow for comparison we get this, a much more lively and natural tone.
And this technique of properly setting the white balance can be very useful, because sometimes we might not even realise the potential in an image until we see the proper colours.
But there’s also a time and a place for it. When working with coloured lights, you might not want to white balance for the coloured light but instead white balance for a neutral white beforehand to get the coloured light to come through more accurately.
For this image I set the white balance beforehand for a neutral white before lighting the picture with red light
If you don’t set the balance manually when working with coloured light you can greatly reduce or completely lose their effects, this picture was actually shot in orange light and it shouldn’t look like this at all, it should actually look like the picture below
So that’s white balancing in a nutshell, hopefully this won’t be a one off blog post, I’ll try to be regular, in the meantime, subscribe to the mailing list and check out the instagram for more up to date pictures!