Pixiq

Automatic White Balance

While automatic white balance is useful for shooting quickly in changing light conditions, I rarely select Auto as my standard. The Auto setting often gives inconsistent results simply because it is an automatic function dealing with the real world of color and light. If you use it and take two photos at opposite ends of your zoom range, for example, you may find the wide-angle shot shows a different color balance than the telephoto. This is because there is so much variation in the scene as it is taken in by the two lens settings.

Another example of a common white balance problem is when you photograph at sunrise and sunset. We are used to photographing at these times (and seeing images of them) with daylight-balanced film, which makes them warmer than what we actually

see with the eye. If you shoot with Auto white balance, the digital camera will usually try to remove some of that warm color, as it doesn’t know what you expect from the scene. It just sees what seems to be a lot of very warm light that needs to be corrected. In this instance, you are better off choosing one of the presets.

Digital cameras come with a package of predetermined, preset white balance settings. These are very useful because you can try to match the conditions to the preset’s name—Sun, Shade, Cloudy, Fluorescent, etc. This is especially useful if you need to take a photo indoors under fluorescent lights. The lighting can be tricky to balance. Using the Fluorescent setting, the colors will clean up quite well. Some cameras come with many different presets, even including multiple fluorescent choices.

The first critical issue in choosing which white balance setting to use is to consider matching the preset to the light it was designed to measure. This does several important things for the photographer:

• Colors look natural.

• Neutral tones stay neutral (or at least reasonably neutral).

• Photos have consistent white balance in a given lighting condition.

With a preset in a specific lighting condition, all photos will have the same color balance and do not change color from shot to shot. When shooting with Auto white balance, you can get variation in color as the camera tries to compensate for different objects in the frame, even though the light has not changed. It can be very frustrating to cope with variation of the color in photographs due to the unpredictability of Auto white balance.

Getting the Most from the Presets

To get the most from white balance, you need to think beyond the preset’s specific name. Using the Flash white balance setting for most outdoor photos is like adding a warming filter to the scene—an effect I like. Unfortunately, there are no precise “standard” specifications or definitions of manufacturers’ white balance settings, so this may or may not work for you. You may find that your camera does a nicer job using the Shade or Cloudy settings.

I believe that it is really worth experimenting with white balance settings. Try the different preset settings on the same subject to see what they do and think how you might use them beyond their specific names. The really neat thing about doing experiments like this with a digital camera is that you waste no film, and you don’t even have to take notes! The picture’s metadata (see page 90) will tell you nifty things like the white balance that was used for the shot. There is a button on most cameras that you push to see basic data about a photo on the LCD. It is often labeled “Display” or “Info.” You can also read complete metadata in many browser and image processing programs.

Although you can’t completely evaluate the effects of the preset white balance settings until you download the images to your computer, your camera’s LCD can help you roughly judge the different settings on a particular scene. It is true that the little monitor on the camera isn’t that accurate for judging all colors, but still, it gives you a very good idea of what the colors are doing in a given situation.