1. White Balance
Digital Photography 2863

2. Every scene has its own particular
color temperature.

3. This is because all types of light
have different color overtones.

4. All good quality digital cameras
allow the photographer to adjust the
temperature of a scene.

5. This adjustment is called “white balance”
for a good reason.

6. White balance is accurate when a white or
neutral area of your image contains equal
amounts of red, green and blue.

7. In other words, white appears white.

8. What you need to understand is that almost
all light has some type of color overtones.

9. Only a photolamp is
specifically adjusted to
produce pure white light.

10. However, even
these expensive
lamps can give a
slight color cast of
one temperature or
another.

11. As a photographer, one of the many tasks you
must accomplish during a photo shoot is to
correctly evaluate the color temperature of
the scene.

12. As you acquire more experience and skill, you will
be able to judge color temperatures more
accurately.

13. The reason that the color of light in your photographs looks
different than the way you saw it with your naked eyes is that the
eye gradually adjusts and compensates for color temperature
automatically.

14. Your camera - as awesome a piece of equipment
as it is - can not do this. It simply records the color
temperature it sees.

15. The white balance adjustments you make in
camera apply processing to the data that the
sensor records and “corrects” the temperature.

16. However, this does not happen when you are
shooting in “camera raw.”

17. Let’s review what shooting in camera raw actually
is...

18. Your sensor is overlaid with color filters that block
out all but red, green and blue light which is then
recorded on the photosites of the sensor.

19. These measurements are not actually recording
color but the amount of light in each of the color
channels.

20. Then your camera analyzes the data - from dark to
light - and translates it into binary code (zeroes and
ones) onto the memory card in your camera.

21. The difference in raw and other formats is that the
data is further processed in the camera before
outputting to your memory card and raw data goes
straight to memory without any further processing.

22. Most digital cameras can shoot in raw, jpeg, or tiff
formats. Here is a diagram of what happens to the
data after the sensor captures the data.

23. All of the extra in camera processing of your image
data reduces the amount of data available when
retrieved from the memory card.

24. Remember that every adjustment made to any digital image
involves the discarding of certain bits or pixels of information.

25. In every case, shooting
in raw gives you the
least amount of
processing to the
image data.

26. This in turn gives you the most data to work with as you
develop your images on the computer.

27. However, there are different views on whether adjusting the
white balance in camera while taking raw makes any difference
in the data on your memory card.

28. These images are from a 2011 article by Sarah Wilkerson that
purport to show a difference in the exposure quality when using
different white balance adjustments in camera shooting raw. All
exposure adjustments are the same; only the white balance
adjustment is different. It is hard to see in this slide show, but the
image on the right actually has more visual information in it.

29. This screenshot from the Nikon website says that white balance
does not affect the data.

30. All this conversation really does is reinforce what we already know
about working with our own camera: we need to experiment and
try out every possible variable to know our camera better than
anyone else.

31. So, I did my own experiment with my Nikon D300 to test the
results with MY camera.

32. I set my shutter speed to 1/80,
ISO to 200,
and aperture to f/5.6
for all of the following
photographs taken at the same
time using different white
balance settings in raw format.

33. Auto

34. Incandescent

35. Fluorescent

36. Daylight

37. Flash

38. Cloudy

39. Shade

40. 2500 K

41. 5000 K

42. 10,000 K

44. The next slide shows all the different
shots, taken into Lightroom and having
AUTO applied to the white balance
setting.

46. They all look exactly the same!!!

48. to be continued...