With you camera setup to do auto white balance your camera is going to look at the scene you are shooting and guess at what the white balance should set to.
Auto White Balance (AWB)Įvery camera comes set to do auto white balance. The white balance controls in the Basic panel of the Develop module in Lightroom Classic. Both of us like to “warm” the tones in the image by moving the temperature slider to the right toward the yellow side. You can get technically perfect white balance as you are doing your shoot, and we go into the details below, but neither Jeff nor Connor like the way the images look with technically perfect white balance. There are three primary options for dealing with white balance in your camera. Three Primary Options for Setting White Balance Some photographers don’t do that, but this is a core part of the business model for Jeff as he shoots portraits where he is sending the images to an iPad as he shoots so that the client can review them. Getting white balance at least close on your camera is especially important if you are shooting portraits and you are going to show them to your client while you are shooting. We are huge proponents of doing all you can to get things right in camera to make your life easier when you edit on the computer. Please don’t think we are recommending you don’t worry about white balance because you can fix it on the computer (fix it in post as many photographers will say). If you shoot JPEG you can still change the white balance in Lightroom, but you have a little less room to do it. This is especially true of you shoot raw. The great news is that if you get the white balance wrong in camera it is usually pretty easy to fix it when you edit the photo on the computer using a photo editing tool like Lightroom Classic. Can Photographers Change White Balance on the Computer? Measuring white balance using incident light over reflected light may be more accurate in some shooting situations, but really not so much for it to be a big concern for most photographers. Most of the time there isn’t such a significant difference when measuring exposure using incident vs reflective lighting for it to be a big concern for most photographers.
Professional portrait photographers may use incident light meters for exposure because they can be more accurate than the reflective light meter inside your camera. They are meters external to your camera that you use where the subject of the photo is rather than by your camera. There are light meters ( Kenko KFM-1100 $250) that can be used to measure for exposure based on incident light. The light bouncing off your subject was measured by a sensor in the camera to show you the information on the level of light that was received.
If you have used the light meter inside your camera to help you get the right exposure, you used reflective light to do that. Reflective light is the light bouncing off of your subject into your camera. Incident light is the light falling on the subject you are shooting. The words sound difficult, but with a little explanation it isn’t too hard to understand. We have to briefly cover a topic that most photographers don’t know about or associate with white balance, but for the custom white balance topic further down you need to understand a little about incident vs reflective light. Incident vs Reflective Light Measurements
If you aren’t quite to that point in your journey to master the art of photography, you should focus your time and effort on fully understanding aperture, shutter speed, and ISO before you dive into white balance.
Photographers tend to learn how to deal with white balance after they have learned how to get good exposure. Though if you have gone through all of the effort to put yourself in the good spot to create images of a sunrise/sunset you want to get the light to look like it did in person. If white balance is off with a portrait that person can look like a smurf (blue tint) or an alien (green/orange skin).
White balance tends to be something more important to photographers who do portraits where the skin tones need to look like the person. Photos taken indoors often have a pretty significant orange or yellow tint to them for example. If you shoot with a white balance setting on your camera that is not what it should be for what you are shooting, you end up with images that have a color tint to them. Different types of light sources have different color tints that will affect the colors in your photo. It can range from 1,000 Kelvin through 10,000 Kelvin. White balance is the color temperature of the light illuminating what you are shooting.
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