You’re using white balance on your camera all wrong – stop trying to ‘fix’ the light!

Back in the days of film, you chose a stock to match the lighting and that was it – you were stuck with it. Daylight film for just about everything, but tungsten for studio tungsten lighting. However, with digital cameras we have no such restriction. The camera can automatically compensate for the color of the lighting with a white balance adjustment.

If you want to take back manual control of your camera, don’t just stop at manual exposure and manual focus; you also need to take control of the camera’s color rendering.

Choosing a preset white balance setting isn’t perhaps as central to manual photography as exposure and focus control, but it is important if you’re aiming for consistency. And this applies to both JPEG and RAW files.

“Wait a minute. RAW files, too?” I hear you say. “Surely with RAW files you can choose whatever white balance setting you like when you process the images?”

That’s true, but the software will always start from your camera’s ‘as shot’ setting, and if this differs from one shot to the next, you’ll often get subtle color variations between images shot in the same light. Not good.

No big deal, right? You can simply select all the photos from that session in your processing suite and set them all to the same white balance setting.

But not only is this an extra job you need to do in post, in my experience, even the best photo-editing software like Adobe Camera Raw and Capture One doesn't accurately simulate the camera’s own ‘as shot’ WB settings, which I usually find to be truer. Like I say, that’s just my experience.

The easy solution is to choose a white balance preset when you shoot. This will be embedded in the RAW files and you’ve saved yourself a job. I almost always use the camera’s ‘daylight’ white balance, unless I’m shooting in mixed artificial lighting, when I use 'auto'.

“But doesn’t that mean that some of my shots will be off-color? Otherwise, what are the ‘cloudy’ and ‘shade’ preset for, except to neutralize color variations?” Well, this brings me onto what I think is one of the most serious misunderstandings about white balance…

Who says photographs have to be ‘white balanced’?

Yes, accurate white balance is important for commercial photography, or weddings or portraits, but for most outdoor shots the color of the light is an important part of the picture.

You don’t want the camera’s auto white balance filtering out the golden glow of a sunset or the deep blue of pre-dawn light. These are the very things you want to capture. And by setting the camera to its neutral ‘daylight’ setting, you’re forcing it to record these colors exactly as they are and not try to ‘fix’ them.

So choosing a white balance preset isn’t the most important step you can take in regaining manual control of your camera, but it is another instance of where the camera will interfere and potentially muck up the shot – if you let it.

If you shoot JPEGs, getting the white balance right when you shoot is essential, and if you shoot RAW it still saves you time later and gives your shots color consistency when you first view and edit them.

I do recommend auto white balance for mixed artificial lighting, because in these situations there’s seldom one dominant light color, so it’s actually quite helpful for the camera to sample them all and come up with some sort of compromise.

This idea about swapping to manual camera control is not a philosophical argument but a practical one. Automation can indeed be useful, but there are lots of times – probably more than most photographers realize – where manual control doesn’t just give you better results, it’s actually quicker, too. It also encourages a more direct understanding of light and color and how they can be captured.

And if you want those colors to be recorded faithfully, exactly as they are, just set the white balance to ‘daylight’ and leave it there.

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If you want to learn more about white balance, check out this white balance cheat sheet. But what if camera manufacturers have been doing white balance WRONG all along? And if you're new to photography, make sure you get to grips with the exposure triangle.