Mastering White Balance
If you want to be able to control colours, you first have to master white balance. The auto white balance mode is good enough for many purposes, but if the automatic mode fails the result is terrible. For this reason, it is a very good idea to know how to adjust white balance manually.
Perfect Colours
All photographers agree that good life-like colours are essential to shooting perfect photos. Good colours are decisive to image quality whether you are shooting indoors or outdoors, and whether you are shooting people, plants or objects. In order to achieve good colours in your digital photos you need to understand the concept of white balance.
If you are shooting in the forest in early spring you expect the leaves in the finished image to be a particular light green colour. If you are shooting children at a birthday party you expect their faces to have warm skin tones and their cheeks to be red and merry. Nevertheless, the digital camera sometimes gets it all wrong. The result could be an image where what ought to be skin tones instead appear grey.
In this photo the camera has made an error choosing the right white balance. This image has an unwanted colour cast: the skin of the cute kids is obviously much too blue.
This image has been adjusted and colours are life-like. If you store your images in the RAW format this kind of post treatment is extremely easy to do.
Auto or Not Auto
Most digital cameras automatically adjust the white balance for each individual shot. The name "white balance" derives from the fact that the camera attempts to fix a white point for reference that it can subsequently use in order to define all other colours. If the camera is unable to find such a reference point, an error might occur. The result might be that orange becomes blue and white becomes grey, ultimately, the result might be images that are bad or even completely useless.
With time, digital cameras have become better at finding the right white balance, and the problem has consequently become less frequent. Nevertheless, it still occurs from time to time, and even the most expensive cameras in the market can still get it wrong. So when the problem occurs it is very convenient to know about white balance. Adjusting white balance manually is not very complicated.
If you want life-like colours in your photos there is no getting around mastering white balance. This photo of a withered leaf was shot near Loch Lomond, Scotland.
Decide the Correct White Balance Yourself Using the RAW Format
Should your camera make an error adjusting the white balance during exposure, the problem is easily solved if you are using the RAW format. This format allows you to choose a completely different white balance on your own computer and see the result instantly. The RAW image is sometimes called a digital negative. This name, among other things, indicates that a change in software does not lead to a loss of image quality. As demonstrated in the previous example, your software can do wonders with photos that seem completely hopeless.
In the TTF gallery you will find many examples of what images with a correctly adjusted white balance should look like.
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