 BetterPhoto Member |
white balance Can you explain how to use the white balance on a digital camera?? I get confused when to adjust it.
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robert G. Fately |
Nita, the thing you first need to understand is that light comes in various colors, depending on the source. Even though our eyes see fairly consistent color under flourescent, tungsten and daylight (your red and blue dress always seems to look red and blue) the fact is that these different light sources put out variations of colored lighting. Light color is measured in "temperature" (it's a physics thing, I won't bore you with details). So, outdoors at noon on a cloudless day the "color temperature" is about 5000 degrees Kelvin. Typical indoor lighting (tungsten-filament bulbs) is more like 3400 degrees Kelvin - a bit reddish. Flourescents are all over the map, though usually in the purple-y or greenish range of colors. In the film world, a manufacturer would "balance" the chemical sensitivities in the film to match one of these kinds of light, and if you used the "wrong" film you could get off-color results. Most folks are familiar with taking snapshots indoors at night, where the light is from lamps and such, and getting prints back that have that reddish cast (warm tones). This is because the daylight balanced film in the camera was not designed to work with the redder light from basic light bulbs. With digital, this issue can be dealt with electronically - setting the white balance is the techie term for, in essence, telling the camera's computer what color of light will be illuminating the subject so the computer can compensate accordingly - avoiding that reddish cast on indoor shots. I hope that makes some sense. As for how you would set white balance - this depends on the specific camera you have.
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