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White Balance 179

5.22 WHITE BALANCE
Menu Position Menu  5  White Balance

What it Does Invokes one of many tools for compensating for light that is
not pure white

Recommended Setting: AWB unless your camera is producing yucky results
under artificial light, in which case I strongly endorse “Custom WB”

Have you ever taken a picture indoors at night using a film camera (without
a flash), and were surprised to see your results come out looking a little
yellowish? Or have you ever taken pictures under a fluorescent light, only
to step back in horror when the pictures turned out sort of a ghoulish green?
If so, you inadvertently witnessed evidence that all artificial light is NOT
the same!

Figure 5-37: White Balance Examples. Photos taken under normal light bulbs
can turn out yellow-orangish, but the proper white balance setting can make it
look the way we remember seeing it.

It turns out that, while sunlight contains all seven colors of the rainbow,
incandescent light (that which comes from ordinary light bulbs) and
fluorescent light radiate only 2 or 3 colors out of the spectrum. Our brains
do a wonderful job of adjusting to this different light, but alas, one of the
biggest drawbacks of film was that it could not automatically correct for
indoor light. You had to use filters, otherwise the result was often strangely