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Tips & Techniques for Getting Creative With White Balance in Photography

White balance is basically the way a camera interprets the warmth of the light present in a scene. Various light sources, such as the sun on an overcast day or artificial lighting indoors, impart a different quality to the same scene. Often, these differences may be too subtle for a person's eyes to pick up, but a camera's sensor is highly sensitive to these nuances. Therefore, altering white balance can make very noticeable changes to photographs. A photographer can adjust the white balance to ensure a photo reflects the natural light of the scene, or she may add a creative, unnatural quality by altering the white balance outside of normal ranges.

Altering White Balance Settings
- Most cameras have several preset options for the user to set his own white balance, which are suitable for certain conditions. These normally include options for shade, fluorescent light, full sun, cloudy days and indoor light, usually called "tungsten." A flash setting is also useful for reducing the bright, harsh light of a flash. As each of these settings tells the camera to recognize light as being redder, bluer or more orange than it is in reality, a clever photographer can opt for a suitable setting to improve his photos. These settings typically give pictures a more natural appearance than the automatic setting, but can be used creatively to enhance the warmth or coolness of photos.
Color Calibration
- Professional photographers may wish to set their own white balance on a photo shoot, under the prevailing light. Typically, a photographer chooses the manual setting for white balance on the camera and calibrates it by focusing on a sheet of white paper, or another flat, monochrome object like the underneath of a jar lid, and taking a picture. The calibrating object has to be entirely one color in case the camera accidentally picks up on speckles of a different color. While often this is to get the most natural look, the photographer can also tweak the camera's color recognition by calibrating the camera to a flat, one-color object that is not white. This results in photos with unnatural colorings. Another option is to calibrate the white balance to an object in the scene that is a particular shade of white, like a flower, which results in subtler color changes, and allows the flower to pop out as the palest object in the picture.
Warming
- Considering some scenes have naturally cold light, such as snow-covered landscapes, warming the picture's appearance may seem counterproductive, but a setting on the warmer end of the scale like fluorescent can give the cold snow and its surroundings a more unnaturally well-lit quality. Warm scenes, such as a sunrise, which contain lots of reds and oranges, can be enhanced to produce a photo that bursts with warm tones. Suitable settings to add more oranges and reds into a photo, apart from fluorescent, are the flash, cloudy and shade settings. Faces, for example, in shade often appear to have a blue cast on an automatic setting, whereas on shade setting, the faces regain their natural warmth and coloration.
Cooling
- Settings that cool down a scene and introduce more blue light into the photo are those that are meant to be used in conditions of warm light, such as a sunny or tungsten setting. Cool icicles can appear even more chilly in a bluer-than-normal picture. Cooled-down sunsets appear to have a bluer tone than normally occurs in nature. A close-up portrait of a face can have a moodier atmosphere if the natural warmth of the skin and eyes are stripped down to blue, dramatic shades.

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