White balance & color
Presets versus Kelvin, when white balance matters, and keeping color consistent across a set.
- Explain color temperature and how white balance corrects it
- Decide when to set white balance precisely and when RAW makes it forgiving
- Keep color consistent across a series of frames
Light has color, even when your eyes insist it is white. White balance is how the camera decides what “white” means under a given light — and getting it right is what makes skin look like skin and snow look clean.
Color temperature
Light is measured in Kelvin. Low numbers are warm and orange — candlelight around 2000K, a tungsten bulb near 3000K. High numbers are cool and blue — overcast daylight around 6500K, deep shade higher still. Confusingly, warm light has a low number. Your brain corrects for all of this automatically; the sensor does not, so you tell it.
Presets versus Kelvin
The presets — Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Incandescent, Fluorescent — are quick and usually close. Auto white balance is genuinely good on this body and a fine default. When you want precision, set a Kelvin value by hand: raise the number to warm the image, lower it to cool it. For critical color, a custom white balance read off a grey card is the gold standard.
When it actually matters
If you shoot RAW, white balance is fully adjustable afterward with no penalty — so on a casual day, Auto is plenty and you fix any misses later. It matters most when:
- You shoot JPEG, where the choice is baked in.
- You shoot video, where correcting later is more work.
- Color must be exact — product, food, skin under mixed light.
In those cases, set it deliberately rather than trusting Auto.
Consistency across a set
Auto white balance can drift frame to frame as your framing changes, which makes a series tedious to match later. When you are shooting a set — an event, a series of portraits, a room — lock white balance to a fixed preset or Kelvin value so every frame shares the same baseline. One correction then fixes them all.
Mixed light
The hard case is two light colors at once — warm lamplight and cool window light in the same room. There is no single right answer; pick the light on your subject and balance for that, letting the rest go warm or cool. Sometimes that leftover color contrast is the photograph.
In the field
Shoot a white object under a warm indoor bulb using Auto, Daylight, and Incandescent white balance. See how far the presets swing the color. Then, if you shot RAW, correct all three to match — proof of how much latitude the negative holds.