Auto white balance

Short and Sweet

A u t o W h i t e B a l a n c e

Most photographers use the auto white balance setting for virutally all their picture taking. AWB does sound like it solves all the color issues you’ll encounter, and one would think the color balance of daylight, indoor, florescent, night, and flash would turn out correct with this setting.

Not true.

Many lighting situations do, in fact, look good with AWB. However, there are times when it fails. The photo below is a case in point.

This beautiful theater is La Fenice in Venice, Italy. The lighting appeared to be from tungsten light bulbs, so I tried the auto white balance setting first. The results were extremely reddish. I then tried the tungsten (incandescent, i.e., indoors) setting, and again, to my surprise, the colors in the picture were much too red.

In this case, the only choice was to change the Kelvin temperature setting manually. Typical

household light bulbs are 3200K. Had the lights in the theater been traditional 60 watt or 100 watt light bulbs, the tungsten white balance setting on the camera would have produced a correct color balance. But these bulbs were something else -- possibly the new energy saving lights. In the camera menu, I moved the white balance setting to 2000K, and that is what gave me the color you see in the image.

The biggest problem with using AWB all the time is shooting at sunrise and sunset. Auto white balance is designed to ‘correct’ the golden tones at thoses times of the day to be white. We shoot early and late in the day to take advantage of the golden colors that make landscape, cityscapes, and other outdoor subjects beautiful. If those colors are eliminated, the results are disappointing.

Compare the sunset photo below taken with AWB to the same composition shot with daylight white balance on the next page. The difference is dramatic.

You can correct these colors in post-processing with Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. But who wants to look at the LCD monitor on the back of the camera and see pictures with disappointing colors? And who wants to color correct dozens of images after-the-fact.

Please note: you can only correct poor colors at sunrise and sunset if shooting in RAW mode. Jpeg files can’t be corrected to bring back the golden tones of sunrise and sunset.

Shooting outdoors in AWB mode produces pictures that look dull and lifeless when shooting early and late in the day as I show in the image below. Midday shooting is fine with AWB. In fact, both daylight white balance and

auto white balance produce the same color palette when used in the middle of the day.

When shooting after the sun goes down -- dusk, twilight and night -- the colors you see aren’t going to be accurate when using AWB. You may like them or you may not, so this is the time to experiment with different white balance settings. The photo at right of Kotor, Montenegro, at twilight shows deep blue on the mountain and the water and yellow/orange in the lights that illuminate the protective medieval wall around the town.

In a situation like this, you may not know what you want until you can examine the results on the back of the camera. When I tried AWB for this scene, I felt the colors were too desaturated. I also tried tungsten WB and daylight WB and settled on the latter.

For all of my outdoor photography, I use daylight white balance. For twilight and night photography, usually I try all three white balance settings (tungsten, daylight, and AWB) to see which color scheme I like.

On page 11, you can see the dramatic difference in Hong Kong between daylight white balance (the brownish version) and tungsten white balance (the bluish version) when shooting at night. §