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Track 1 · Exposure2 min read

LESSON 06

White balance

Light has a colour. White balance tells the camera which colour to treat as white.

COLOUR TEMPERATURE · 2,000 TO 10,000 K

A colour bar from orange at 2,000 kelvin through white to pale blue at 10,000 kelvin; the daylight band, 5,500 to 6,500 K, is outlined.

Why white needs setting

Light from a bulb, the sky and the sun is not the same colour, and the camera records the difference. White balance shifts every colour in the picture so that a white or grey object comes out neutral, not tinted.

Kelvin

The colour of light is described as a colour temperature, in kelvins. Low numbers are redder and high numbers bluer, the opposite of how we speak of warm and cool colours. Daylight sits between about 5,500 and 6,500 K; early and late in the day the sun is lower in kelvin, and warmer to the eye.

Auto, presets, custom

Cameras offer automatic white balance, presets named after the light (sunny, cloudy, tungsten) and often a kelvin number. For a custom setting, point the camera at a grey card or another neutral object and let it measure the light.

RAW lets you decide later

A RAW file keeps the sensor's data, so its colour can be set again afterwards, as many times as you like. A JPEG has its colours fixed when the camera makes it.

Try it today

  1. 01Put a sheet of white paper under a table lamp.
  2. 02Shoot it on the Daylight preset.
  3. 03Shoot it again on the Tungsten or Incandescent preset.
  4. 04Set a custom white balance from the paper and shoot once more.
  5. 05Compare the paper in the three frames.

Figures from Wikipedia, 'Color balance', 'Color temperature' and 'Raw image format', read 2026.10.16. The steps under Try it today are working practice, not a standard.