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Uploaded byMary Haas
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White balance

White balance is used to adjust the color temperature of light in digital photographs. It is important because light sources have different color casts. When shooting in raw format, white balance settings applied in-camera do not affect the raw data file, but some claim it can impact the exposure quality. The document recommends photographers experiment with their own camera to understand how white balance settings impact raw files.

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White Balance Digital Photography 2863
Every scene has its own particular color temperature.
This is because all types of light have different color overtones.
All good quality digital cameras allow the photographer to adjust the temperature of a scene.
This adjustment is called “white balance” for a good reason.
White balance is accurate when a white or neutral area of your image contains equal amounts of red, green and blue.
In other words, white appears white.
What you need to understand is that almost all light has some type of color overtones.
Only a photolamp is specifically adjusted to produce pure white light.
However, even these expensive lamps can give a slight color cast of one temperature or another.
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.
As you acquire more experience and skill, you will be able to judge color temperatures more accurately.
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.
Your camera - as awesome a piece of equipment as it is - can not do this. It simply records the color temperature it sees.
The white balance adjustments you make in camera apply processing to the data that the sensor records and “corrects” the temperature.
However, this does not happen when you are shooting in “camera raw.”
Let’s review what shooting in camera raw actually is...
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.
These measurements are not actually recording color but the amount of light in each of the color channels.
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.
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.
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.
All of the extra in camera processing of your image data reduces the amount of data available when retrieved from the memory card.
Remember that every adjustment made to any digital image involves the discarding of certain bits or pixels of information.
In every case, shooting in raw gives you the least amount of processing to the image data.
This in turn gives you the most data to work with as you develop your images on the computer.
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.
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.
This screenshot from the Nikon website says that white balance does not affect the data.
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.
So, I did my own experiment with my Nikon D300 to test the results with MY camera.
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.
Auto
Incandescent
Fluorescent
Daylight
Flash
Cloudy
Shade
2500 K
5000 K
10,000 K
The next slide shows all the different shots, taken into Lightroom and having AUTO applied to the white balance setting.
They all look exactly the same!!!
to be continued...