How White Balance Shifts Affect Our Perception

To fully understand how white balance affects our perception, we must first explore how color shapes our emotional response in photography. Since the dawn of time, we humans have become accustomed to associating certain colors with specific contexts. The ability of humans to read visual cues for signs of danger is likely an instinct as a survival mechanism. For example, brightly colored insects scream danger without having to look into the species.

Applying the same context in photography, it is important to understand how colors make us feel when viewing an image, particularly how color changes the mood of an image beyond the subject matter. A lot of this variation often comes down to how the image is processed in color. This also indirectly explains why black and white images often carry a timeless quality because the absence of color creates a sense of detachment. Without the presence of rich color information, it becomes harder for us humans to connect emotionally by just relying on the tonal contrast to convey meaning.

While we as photographers tend to boost saturation in our images to make them much more visually striking or convert them into black and white to portray elegance and timelessness, a lot of times neither approach is appropriate to represent your subject in the image. Therefore, after experimenting with trends like heavy color grading in recent years, I have recently found myself going back to approaching my images with natural color editing, keeping colors as accurate as possible. When adjusting the white balance, I aim to reflect the mood of the scene without over-processing.

Knowing these underlying foundations, how does it help us as photographers, especially when color accuracy is critical when it comes to commercial work? While color accuracy is crucial, we are not looking to achieve the most perfect color reproduction most of the time because perfection is not always possible. The goal is often to get as close as possible to what we perceive as accurate, given the various variables during shooting and post-processing through different imaging pipelines. Managing these factors is challenging, making it impractical to achieve flawless color reproduction every time.

This brings us back to the foundation of how we all interpret color. Take the image example below. Despite being the same image, a mere white balance shift is capable of transforming the entire meaning and mood of the image. This is mainly attributed to how we resonate with warm colors with the Sun and cold colors with the Moon. Hence, largely shifting our perception of the warmer image being a sunset or sunrise scene and the colder image being a night scene.

As both warmer (6,500 K) and colder (3,800 K) white balance work perfectly well on the image above, we can conclude that there is no real correct white balance that works for scenes like this that are low in saturation and have no presence of strong dominant color. Therefore, we can freely choose the appropriate white balance in post-processing based on our creative output. However, if we intend to deliver the most accurate image based on what we shot, then the image with a warmer white balance is indeed much more accurate, as this image was shot during sunrise instead of moonrise.

Lastly, to end this article, I would like to share some tips for managing white balance that I have been using throughout my practice in photography. The number one rule is probably trying to get it as close as possible in real life as a solid starting point. That way, you will not risk introducing strange shifts in the tonal spectrum during post-processing. To make things easier, you can also opt to shoot raw. This is because there is not much leeway in an 8-bit JPEG to make any adjustments without introducing weird hue shifts and color artifacts. While shooting in raw offers flexibility, you should also closely monitor your exposure and white balance to avoid blowing any channel information, especially the red channel, as it's usually the first to go. Lastly, perform manual white balance with gray or white cards whenever possible. That way, you can have a reference point to go back to if you wish to get colors as accurate as possible.