David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

White Balance: Manual or Auto?

Most people new to photography have never even heard of white balance. And the truth is, not many people fiddle with this setting, especially among pocket cam owners.

Anyway, here's the deal: It might freak you out to find out that your brain is constantly playing tricks on you, and color casts are a case in point. Fluorescent lighting is slightly bluish; traditional incandescent indoor lights are a bit yellow; snowy scenes are often bluish, too. But the weird thing is that it doesn't look that way when you're there! Your brain instantly adapts to these lighting casts, making the lighting seem normal.

Cameras, as you've probably learned by now, are brainless. So those varying color temperatures, as they're called, affect your finished photos. From "coolest" (most blue) to "warmest" (most red), the common lighting conditions that produce color casts are candlelight, tungsten (incandescent) bulbs, sunrise/sunset, fluorescent bulbs, camera flash, bright and sunny, daylight with overcast skies, and, finally, outdoors in the shade.

In the days of film, you'd have to correct these color casts by installing a tinted filter on your lens. On a digital camera, though, life's a lot easier: The sensor can do the correcting.

It's supposed to do that automatically, in fact—and generally does, which is why so few people muddle with white balance. Still, there are two reasons why you might want to set the white-balance mode manually:

• Because the camera is not doing a good job, and the pictures are looking color-casty.

• Because you want to try a special effect by deliberately choosing the wrong white-balance setting. In this picture, for example, the snowy scene looks fine with the auto white-balance setting (left). The version on the right was shot with the Tungsten white-balance setting, even though there wasn't a single lightbulb shining on the yard. The Tungsten setting gives the scene a bluer, chillier look.

An SLR has a WB (white balance) button right there on the back. A pocket camera's white-balance controls are, almost always, in the menus somewhere.

Tip

If you're shooting RAW (see below), you don't have to worry about getting the white balance right when you shoot. You'll have complete retroactive control over the white balance later, on the computer.

Either way, you'll generally find that there are presets for precisely the common conditions listed above: Tungsten, Fluorescent, Daylight, Flash, Cloudy, and Shade, for example. You have nothing to lose by experimenting—take a shot, see how it looks on the screen, change the setting, try again—but again, white balance is generally the least of your worries. Besides, you can always correct a color cast later, once the photo's on your computer (Color Correction in iPhoto).

Tip

Better cameras offer one more white-balance option, called Custom. Here, you're supposed to teach the camera what "white" is in the current lighting conditions, so it knows exactly which color cast to subtract. You're supposed to fill the frame with something white or light gray—a shirt cardboard, piece of paper, or even a white-balance card sold just for the purpose—and then hit the OK button.