Today’s digital camera users don’t know how lucky they are! Back in the days of film, you had to buy a film colour-balanced for ‘daylight’ and you just put up with whatever colour shifts occurred as the light changed. Pro studio photographers might switch to specialised ’tungsten’ balanced film, but that was about the extent of your choice.
But digital cameras work differently. Their sensors capture all colours equally, but they offer a variety of ‘white balance’ settings so that you can ‘rebalance’ the colour to suit the conditions.
What is white balance?
The name says it all, really. The camera’s white balance system balances the colours so that white is rendered as white, and not with a colour cast from different types of lighting.
This should give you correct, neutral colours whatever the conditions, so that you can use white balance to dial out the yellow/orange colour cast of artificial lighting, for example, or the cold tones of open shadow under a blue
