A Beginner's Guide to White Balance in Photography

Along with shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, white balance is one of the most fundamental settings on your camera and something you will want to consider before you take a photo. So, what is white balance and why does it matter? This excellent video tutorial will introduce you to white balance, what it is, and how to control it for better images. 

Coming to you from DPReview TV, this great video tutorial will show you what white balance is, why it matters, and how to set it properly in your photos. Your brain is fantastic at dealing with color and figuring out how various light sources affect their rendering, and simply put, cameras are not as skilled at this. As such, we need to give the camera a reference point for the scene, which is where white balance comes into play. If you are shooting JPEGs, it is crucial that you set your white balance properly beforehand, as your image quality will suffer if you try to adjust it significantly in post-processing, but thankfully, if you shoot raw, there is rarely any penalty in leaving your camera on auto white balance and adjusting it in editing. That being said, it's still good practice to get it as close as possible in camera. Check out the video above for the full rundown.

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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2 Comments

I think Fuji has some horrible white balance choices. When using them I usually manually set it or go into the option to fine tune it.

I use a grayscale card and the gamma choose tool in PS to get perfect colors when I need them. Amazing!