17WHITE BALANCE Technique
I
n photography,
everything is about
balance – from
composition and
exposure to colour – and
a tiny tip of the scales can
often produce less-than-
desirable results. White
balance certainly falls into
this category, and remains at
the forefront of how the colours
in your images are balanced
and, indeed, how successfully
your colour images convert to
black & white. Colour balance,
in a nutshell, can make or
break an image.
In a photographic world
where so much can be adjusted
post-capture, the temptation
can be to shoot now and fix
later, but whether you shootimages in raw or JPEG, there
are many reasons why setting
the correct white balance at
the point of capture is the best
way to work.What is white balance?
White balance is a setting that
has been available to video
cameras for decades, but it
was the advent of digital
photography that brought
the setting to stills cameras.
Previously, photographers
would use either daylight
or tungsten-balanced film,
with the former being used
in conjunction with corrective
screw-in filters for other light
sources such as fluorescent
lights. The white balance
settings available on mostGet your
Guarantee perfect colours in-camera
for every shot. James Abbott explains
why white balance still matters
cameras include Auto,
Daylight, Incandescent/
Tungsten, Fluorescent, Flash,
Cloudy, Shade, Custom and
Colour Temperature. The latter
allows you to set white balance
manually in kelvins and is
most useful for situations such
as correcting white balance
in-camera when shooting with
Big Stoppers, which typically
add strong colour casts
to images.
In reality, though, you don’t
need all these settings and the
sheer number of them makes
white balance appear to be
much more complicated than
it really is. Going back to
shooting film, just two types of
film and one or two corrective
filters for the two types of
fluorescent lights were all
you needed and this simplicity
can be applied to digital
photography alongside
some more advancedThe golden hour can
be a tricky time to select
the correct WB setting
Sony A7R III, 16-35mm,
13sec at f/13, ISO 100
Golden light on bracken on
a misty autumn morning
Sony A7R III, 70-200mm f/4,
1/320sec at f/4, ISO 100
The Shard during twilight
with a mix of light sources
Nikon D610, 16-35mm,
1sec at f/11, ISO 100whites right