White Balance Settings are an important function on most modern Digital Cameras. They can mean the difference between a beautifully exposed and balanced digital image and an over or under exposed shot. Below are some of the best White Balance Tips and Tutorials currently available on the Web. We've included a short taste of each one to give you a feel for their approach. Feel free to suggest your own White Balance tips or online resources below in comments:
Understanding White Balance - 'If you come from the world of films, you may remember using filters to correct for incandescent or fluorescent lighting. Most people don't bother and their indoors pictures invariably come out with a yellow/orange or bluish cast. In the digital world, these correction filters are no longer necessary, replaced by a feature found in most -- even the entry-level -- digital cameras called, "White Balance."'
DC Views has an interesting visual introduction to White Balance using an animated GIF to illustrate different White Balance Settings
Digital Camera White Balance: a quantitative tutorial with examples - 'I've always been interested to find out more about the white balance feature on the Nikon Coolpix camera series. Broadly, I knew how this worked but felt that a detailed comparison of photos with different white balance settings would help me take better pictures....
Using White Balance - 'Why do white balance problems happen? Well, the fact of the matter is that regular indoor light can present some of very tricky shooting scenarios. Below, is an explanation of what you need to know.'
Fixing Indoor Light with White Balance - 'Many photos taken indoors have a yellow or brownish cast to them while others simply have dull colors or a lack of vitality. Why is this? Well, the fact of the matter is that regular indoor light can present some of the most beguiling shooting scenarios. This intuition-challenging fact arises because in many cases there seems to be enough light for good photos and if we have our cameras set on auto-flash, as is usually the case by default, the flash will often fail to fire because the camera agrees that there is plenty of light. The difficulty and likelihood of so-so or poor pictures results from the fact that indoor light is often the wrong kind of light.'
DigiCam Help - White Balance - 'Most digital cameras are set to automatic white balance. Under most circumstances the automatic setting does an adequate job of adjusting to different sources of light. However, there are times when this setting needs to be manually changed. The most common white balance settings are daylight (adjustment made for direct sunlight), cloudy (when shooting under cloudy skies); fluorescent (used when fluorescent lamps are the main source of light), incandescent (standard light bulbs).'
White Balance: What is it? And Why does it Matter? - 'White balance is one reason that we shoot raw files when we use our digital cameras. Since the raw files are the raw digital sensor output, and not processed to adjust for white balance, we can adjust after the fact when we download the photos to our computer. That way, if we aren't satisfied with auto white balance or a preset, we can adjust using a custom white balance.'
DP Review - White Balance - 'Most digital cameras also allow you to choose a white balance manually, typically sunlight, cloudy, fluorescent, incandescent etc. Prosumer and SLR digital cameras allow you to define your own white balance reference. Before making the actual shot, you can focus at an area in the scene which should be white or neutral gray, or at a white or gray target card. The camera will then use this reference when making the actual shot.'
