Using the White Balance Settings on Your Digital Camera

These days, there are so many menus and settings on digital cameras that it is difficult to learn them all. Most casual photographers learn the basic settings or rely strictly on the automatic modes of digital point-and-shoot and SLR cameras.

With a little experimenting, you will find that you can command great control of your camera and more importantly, your images.

The white balance setting is one that can have a large effect on the outcome of your images. Understanding white balance and learning how to change the white balance setting in your camera can help you turn an average picture into an exceptional picture.

To put it simply, white balance is the reference point in which your camera determines the true color of white. If you tell your camera that a particular object in the room is white, the camera will calculate the color temperature of your images based on that information.

First, lets look at the different types of environments that we find ourselves in. Sunny days with bright light overhead, overcast days where the light is muted, outside in the shade or under a tree, inside a home with incandescent lights placed randomly throughout, or a gymnasium with florescent lights (one that poses a challenge to many amateur photographers).

Each of these scenarios presents a very different light for you and the camera to deal with. With a few simple adjustments to your digital camera (provided that it has white balance settings) you can "tell" your camera how to handle the lighting conditions.

Many of the newer digital cameras have preset white balance settings for some of the more common conditions. If you are taking pictures under less than ideal lighting situations, it is best to change your camera to one of the white balance the preset modes for this lighting.

If you want to take this your photography to the next level, you can learn to create custom white balance settings and take even more control of the situation. Setting a custom white balance will produce better color than your camera's auto and preset white balance settings under many different conditions.

You can do this, in many cameras, by switching from auto white balance to custom white balance. Take a picture of a white surface, in your shooting environment, then use this image to program your camera to understand that, in this location, this image is white. To get the best results, you can use a "Grey Card" (a card printed with 18% grey).Each picture taken thereafter, until you change your white balance setting, will be color balanced. You'll get healthy skin tones, red reds and yellow yellows.

Sure, many of the lighting problems can be fixed in image editing software like Adobe PhotoShop or Corel's PaintShop Pro, but editing each image takes time. Taking the time to set your white balance before shooting your pictures will save you lots more time in the post-capture phase.

One piece of advice: You must also remember to reset your white balance or turn off custom white balance when you switch shooting environments, or your images will be captured with potentially incorrect color balance.

Once you learn to set the white balance of your camera, you will find yourself using this feature at every important shoot. Heck, it's there, why not use it?