In my last article I covered the basics of working with your white balance in the Program Mode. Today I would like to explain a bit about WHY you need to set it manually.

You see, your camera is like a computer, but only for taking and processing pictures. If that computer is not programmed correctly it will not work correctly. Your eye is the main thing camera developers study to make better quality cameras and lenses, so lets take a look at that for a minute.

Your eyes automatically assess what they are looking at and set a “white balance”‘ so that you almost always see things as white light. You can see a lot of color variations, but you don’t see people under tungsten lighting as being orange as the light they are under, because your eyes automatically correct it. Wasn’t YAH(God) amazing when he created your eyes?

Unfortunately, your camera and lenses are not as good at making automatic adjustments as your eyes are. So you must set the white balance manually to get it just right, although there will be some situations where even setting the correct white balance won’t compensate the colors enough to get it perfect, and that’s when you take it to Photoshop. But, if you control the white balance manually, you should be able to avoid this most of the time.

I failed to include some samples of how the different white balance settings work, I will remedy that mistake now.

 

Auto white balance.

Sunlight white balance.

Shade white balance.

cloudy white balance

Tungsten white balance.

White Fluorescent white balance.

Flash white balance.

I do not have a “Custom white balance” here because that will vary from person to person and camera to camera. I hope this helps you all to understand the white balance of your camera better.

this is Sarah’s Scenes Real Life photographer.

Lesson: understand your camera, and you can help it understand what you want to see, and you will have an easier time getting that picture the way you want it.