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What Is the White Balance Setting on my Digital Camera?

Have you ever taken a picture of a beautiful winter scene and been disappointed to discover the crisp, white snow came out with a bluish tint? This is the kind of situation your digital cameras white balance is meant to prevent.

The white balance is a sensor that analyzes the lighting conditions and colors of a scene and adjusts so the white in the picture appears white. This helps insure the other colors appear as natural as possible. This is one advantage digital photography has over tradition film. With film, you buy with a certain lighting condition in mind. If that changes, you need to either change your film or hope you can fix any errors in post-production.

Most digital cameras allow you to use either automatic white balance or choose between several preset conditions such as full sun, cloudy day and so forth. Automatic white balance will work in most conditions. There may be times, however when you want to warm up a picture to enhance the color, such as for portraits or sunsets. The best way to do this is set your cameras white balance to cloudy. This will deepen the colors and add a glowing quality to portraits. It will take a beautiful sunset and enhance it to the point of incredible.

Practice taking the same photo with different white balance settings to get a feel for the changes each setting evokes. Keep notes until you have a good idea of what each setting does. In time, you will come to automatically sense which setting is best for your particular situation.

White balance is a small setting that can make big changes in your finished photos. Make it your friend and you will no longer have to worry about faded sunsets or blue snow.

It helps when learning to use your new digital camera to also know what some of the more common terms mean. Below you will find many of these common terms defined..
Automatic Mode A setting that sets the focus, exposure and white-balance automatically.
Burst Mode or Continuous Capture Mode a series of pictures taken one after another at quickly timed intervals with one press of the shutter button.
Compression The process of compacting digital data, images and text by deleting selected information.
Digital Zoom Cropping and magnifying the center part of an image.
JPEG The predominant format used for image compression in digital cameras
Lag Time The pause between the time the shutter button is pressed and when the camera actually captures the image

LCD (Liquid-Crystal Display) is a small screen on a digital camera for viewing images.

Lens A circular and transparent glass or plastic piece that has the function of collecting light and focusing it on the sensor to capture the image.
Megabyte (MB) Measures 1024 Kilobytes, and refers to the amount of information in a file, or how much information can
be contained on a Memory Card, Hard Drive or Disk.
Pixels Tiny units of color that make up digital pictures. Pixels also measure digital resolution. One million pixels
adds up to one mega-pixel.
RGB Refers to Red, Green, Blue colors used on computers to create all other colors.
Resolution Camera resolution describes the number of pixels used to create the image, which determines the amount of
detail a camera can capture. The more pixels a camera has, the more detail it can register and the larger the picture can be
printed.
Storage Card The removable storage device which holds images taken with the camera, comparable to film, but much smaller. Also called a digital camera memory card…
Viewfinder The optical “window” to look through to compose the scene.
White Balance White balancing adjusts the camera to compensate for the type of light (daylight, fluorescent, incandescent, etc.,) or lighting conditions in the scene so it will look normal to the human eye.