You take the picture, you look at the little glowing screen and every thing is red & orange? This isn't what you expected. The light from the house lamp was soft and glowing, not a raging fire storm of red & orange. You are a victim of a poor color balance. Maybe the auto function on your camera didn't quite read the source right. Maybe there is a mix of light sources causing your problem, either way your picture just doesn't look like you thought it would.
Never fear, there is a cure for this and it's lurking in your camera. However to really understand this function we must first talk about the human eye and your brain.
Your eyes are amazing things by themselves: little cameras, if you will, that allow us to see the world around us. Not just see, but see amazingly well and in color. When you pair these mechanisms with the brain, you have nothing short of a mini color computer built into your head.
The problem with the image in our first example is that it was shot under tungsten light and your camera did a poor job of correcting for it. See, cameras are balanced normally for daylight which is more cyan-blue than the tungsten lamps in your home. If the camera performs poorly, you have an option. You can manually set your color balance (on most cameras) to correct for this problem.
The adjustment is called white balance. What is it? Well in a nutshell, it is several of the most common filters that photographers used to have to carry in their bags, contained in a neat little menu setting or dial adjustment on your digital camera.
This setting will electronically filter out specific colors of light so that any lighting source looks more "natural" or like daylight. Take our tungsten shot for example. When set on the "tungsten" white balance setting, your camera will add extra cyan-blue to the scene to help offset all that red orange coming from your light source and causing those raging colors you are seeing.
The color of the light you are shooting has a temperature, a color temperature measured in degrees Kelvin. These Kelvin temperatures can be found on most light sources telling you what "color" the bulb is that you are photographing under.
Digital camera manufacturers have incorporated some of the most common color settings into their camera to assist photographers in keeping their color "normal" when shooting. The most common settings are; Daylight or the most common color of light that people photograph under, Cloudy day or open shade, Tungsten, Fluorescent & Electronic flash. In addition to these settings, some camera manufacturers also include the full color balance Kelvin scale and "custom" settings.
If you choose to experiment with these settings, you will find that your images will appear in a more "normal" way when used properly. You can also choose to use the settings in a creative way to "add" color to an image in order to create a different feel.
The real problem sometimes is remembering that you changed the settings. If you forget to change them back and you start shooting at say the beach, with the camera set on Tungsten, everything will look incredibly blue.
Most of the time, your automatic white balance setting on your camera will be more that adequate for just about everything you are doing.
However, there might be times when you need a little extra help & when you do remember Kelvin and your white balance adjustment to get a better picture. You can use the chart included here to help you decide which balance setting might be best for you. - Aloha
