White Balance

Okay, we've already discussed about aperture, shutter speed and ISO to create a proper exposure. But why our images have this unrealistic color contrast or orange color? White balance has to do with the color temperature of our light. With a different source of light there are different white balance we have to use. You can see how white balance affects the color of the images below. 

Fig. 1 Auto White Balance Setting

Fig. 2 Custom White Balance Setting (2,200k)

 White Balance explained by Mark Wallace

White Balance Tools  from Marlene

I use auto & cloudy white balance most of the time in outdoors (except sunset) because it gives me realistic colors in my images. For indoor like bedroom, restaurants and sunset I use the custom white balance because images will appear to have an orange color. Shooting in RAW will give you also the ability to adjust your white balance using softwares than JPEG in post processing. However, we should realize that our aim is to get it right when we press that shutter release button so that we can spend more time taking pictures than spending time in the computer. Don't worry we'll have an article comparing JPEG and RAW. For time being we'll only be shooting JPEG images.