When I shot film, before the digital revolution, I would pick my film stock with a specific intention … based on the lighting conditions I was expecting. But once I started shooting digital, first with Canon, and then later with Fujifilm, I just set my WB to auto. It was a case of “set it, and forget it.” But honestly, why in the world would I leave it up to the camera (today), when in the past I always seriously considered it. Thanks for resetting my perspective. Well done!
I'm with you, Brent! Back in the film era I paid a lot of attention to color temperature. Camera auto white balance was a big change. Another big change is that so much of lighting has transitioned from 3200K tungsten to 5500K daylight LED. In the past, I had to gel windows so the daylight coming in would match the hot, tungsten lights (or vice versa), but now it's often the case that everything is daylight balanced. I do still gel windows with ND so they aren't blown out vis-a-vis the interior lighting, but I don't typically color balance these days. Anyway, like you, I sort of forgot about color temperature in the transition. Sean's video is a simple but bold wake-up call that we should be paying more attention to! As he describes, there are times when we don't want White Balance set at 5500K, like a white wedding dress. Also, with sports, I think a blue overcast day, or an orange tungsten gym, or a green-cast gym, in all those cases, I'd prefer a neutral color balance. But, exactly as he describes, for street, photojournalism, documentary, and other scenarios, it makes total sense to let the images reflect the color of the light as experienced, not wiped out by auto white. How did I not think of this before!???
@@Millie-um2bi Not even sometimes. On a sunny day, depending on if you are pointing at a sunny area or a shady area, or depending on your subject, you can watch WB shift dramatically as you pan. Recently I had my camera pointed towards a cut tree branch, some of the leaves had begun to turn brown. Depending on if I was focused on the green grass in the background or the brown leaves in the foreground (Both in sunny conditions), WB shifted from 6500 to 3500
It’s crazy, I’ve been shooting for 14 years. I’ve watched hundreds of RU-vid videos on photography, and this is the first time I completely understood HOW white balance works. Don’t get me wrong I’ve used white balance expertly over the years to correct colors and also creatively, but that white paper with the color slider made it finally click for me. Props on the teaching skills! I appreciate it, thank you!
I have never thought of white balance this way before. Thanks for the clear explanation and offering this as food for thought. I think I'll give it a try!
I want to counter this concept by explaining how white balance works when shooting in RAW. When you shoot in RAW with AWB enabled, the in-camera white balance temperature (as well as the calculated tint shift value) are stored inside the RAW file as METADATA. The individual pixel data is not modified by the white balance before being written into the RAW file. This means that, no matter what white balance value you set in-camera, when shooting RAW the pixel data will be EXACTLY THE SAME. Now, the downside of setting a specific white balance value is that only your custom white balance value will be stored in the metadata of your RAW files. This means that you are LOSING an important reference value (two, actually, when you consider the tint shift) that you might later want to either use or at least reference when editing your photos. So, if you shoot with AWB on in RAW format, not only do you preserve the camera’s in-moment interpretation of the light (WB and Tint), but you can modify the white balance to literally ANY value in post, and the result would be exactly the same as having shot in RAW with the same white balance value explicitly set. TL;DR you lose nothing shooting RAW with AWB, but you lose useful reference values when shooting RAW with a specific white balance specified! Finally, remember that you can always batch-set your WB to 5500 when importing your photos into your processing software of choice! You don’t have just a “broad range of flexibility” when changing the white balance on a RAW… You have TOTAL flexibility! Additional: It IS a great idea to batch-set your RAW photos on import into your editing software to a WB of 5500K. You still preserve the metadata value for AWB and tint shift in the RAW (and you can compare the calculated with 5500K if you want to, as well). I just strongly disagree that you should explicitly set your camera to shoot everything at 5500K. Sorry, but that is wholly unnecessary and you're sacrificing genuinely-important in-moment calculated information that absolutely can make a huge difference in post. To give you an example: when shooting in an environment with multiple light sources with different colour temps, it's extremely useful to know what bias and/or balance your camera calculated for that shot so that you can calculate your own WB when post-processing the image (or even do masked WB adjustments to different parts of an image depending on the calculated colour tone of that light source)
And this video shows us how people desperately and blindly look for some sort of magic tricks from their favorite creators. Thanks a lot for your comment I thought whole wb range is saved in raw no matter what settings
You’re totally correct. That said, for my workflow I have no interest in what the camera AWB value would be (what you refer to as a reference value). It more important for me to have a consistent value from shot to shot as I take many frames of a subject over a period of time. So I set it to 5500k and forget it until I adjust in post. Yes your suggestion to import at 5500k accomplishes the same thing but I prefer a ‘one less thing to think about in cam’ approach. Horses for courses. Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
Yes, but if your are gonna do hundreds of shots under the same conditions, it can save you a lot of editing time if you set the WB on camera, even if you can bulk edit.
@@danielsantisteban How exactly does it save time? You simply apply the 5500K white balance setting at the point of importing the RAW images into your editing application of choice. It adds no time at all to do this (especially if you set it as your default)
Old guy here and I use white balance creatively. Just used, what pleases the image. But I never got the “how stuff works” part, which left me always wanting to “really understand”. That strip thingy did it for me, brilliant ! 😀
This video finally helped me understand why I was going insane trying to figure out why I wasn't able to get my camera to capture the colors I was seeing when photographing a night scene that had both warm and cool lighting.
After watching this video, I realized I've never fully understood white balance in digital photography. This made all the pieces I've tried to learn come together for me. Thank you for being the incredible communicator you are, Sean!
We were so happy to have the WB auto correction that we forgot that a white paper under a lamp should be orange 😅 Thanks for the reminder, great video as always! 👍 I'll definitely experiment more with the WB settings
There is no such thing as correct white balance, you may want a picture look one way or another. You may want to make a sunset very warm, for example. You may want to make a portrait look warmer, because it's more pleasant. That's why there are many presets to change the mood. It also isn't true that WB at 5500K would make the image look like what the eye sees in the same situation, not even close. In fact, setting the image to the correct temperature would look close to what the eye sees. Don't confuse it with calibration by using the gray card.
After 50 years of photography, hobby only, I realized the deep truth of how we see and yes, film was as it was. Digital wants to make it better, what is already perfect. Thank you.
Film cameras could not accurately depict what the human eye can see. Digital cameras are not yet able to, but they’re getting closer. Film was not “perfect” in the sense of color accuracy.
Film was terrible, use the wrong WB film and your images look bad. Most people were simply buying film rated for daylight and ended up with awful pictures indoors, at sunsets, etc. And even in daylight, the WB of the scenes changes and can result in very warm or very cold colors. It's rare when 5500K is the best match for the scene.
Sean I've been doing this too! It's good to see others use WB this way. After starting photography and learning about WB I pretty quickly discovered that id shooting in uncompressed RAW I could just leave it in one spot and that the in-camera WB doesn't change the data collected, it just embeds a WB setting that your editing software will pickup and set the settings to automatically. You can get the exact same result if you set it in post as you can if you set it in camera! Once I learnt this I decided to leave it at 5500k for the sake of consistency. Always having the same starting WB has given me a consistent reference to understand what temperature light sources are and how my camera sees them. It's allowed me to become aware of how my brain compensates for WB changes when I'm just looking at the world and has trained me to understand temperatures of light sources so much better than I would have if I set WB in camera! I would encourage others to try this way of doing WB too, even if it's only for a couple months as a learning experience.
An alternative, of course, is to leave the camera on auto WB and instead have Lightroom apply a specific temperature when importing. Then the images will look the same after imported, "be consistent", but you still have the camera's auto values stored in the RAW and can be used if needed. Note also, that WB is not stored in the RAW as a Kelvin number. That is why the kelvin-setting in the camera will not yield the similar number showing in Lightroom.
You vastly underestimate how much our eyes adjust to light temperature, the pictures with AWB are closer to the scene when you saw it in person, not after the fact when viewing on a monitor with a different light temperature around. Where I live sandstorms are a frequent occurrence, and going from the sepia-like outside to inside with a white or cool lighting makes interiors look freezing cold blue. White LEDs turn into blue neon, after a few minutes your eyes adjust and it's white again.
our minds actually fill in missing details. If we go into a scene that is lit up by tungsten, our eyes may adjust white balance slightly but its our minds that will make more sense of what the actuality might be. It really depends how familiar you are of that scene in different lights as to how you perceive it. That few minute adjustment you speak of is not a mechanism of the eyes but your brain making that adjustment. You could argue that the cold blue when you come back inside is the 'real' colour. Your eyes merely receive the information for our brains to process. It would be an interesting experiment to get people to reproduce colours of objects within an unfamiliar scene that is lit up by different kelvins of light to see how they are remembered.
@@livinagoodlife true that it's the brain doing the correction, as eyes are just receptors. But I find it hard to argue that the blue tone is the ground truth, because it's the result of being outside where everything is orange (think Breaking Bad Mexico filter, but even more intense), so your vision cools things down a lot. This results in a blue tone when going inside where there is "white" lighting because everything is blue-shifted.
@@livinagoodlife I only partly agree. One would need to read a paper on this, but here is what I personally observed and what you can try for yourself: Go outside on a sunny day, and let the sun shine directly into your face, but close your eyes. Instead of darkness, you will see red because the sun shines through the red blood in your eyelids. Stay like this for roughly two minutes. Then look away and open your eyes. You will be outside in a very familiar scene, but everything will look extremely cool, like you sucked the red color out of everything. This works by the same principle as when your eyes adjust to darkness, however just with one color. Of course this is a very extreme example, but by the same principle your eyes will adjust to every lighting condition if it is consistant enough, for example in a sandstorm like has been mentioned before, or if you stay in a room exclusively lit by tungsten light. And that has nothing to do with the brain. I do still think tho, that the brain plays a very significant role in the whole thing, but it's definitely not only the brain.
What you are both saying is valid but also fully subjective. None of it matters other than in theory as long as its a single image. As soon as its a series or even film with various scenes, for the sake of consistency in editing, color balance and aperture is everything. Only proper way is a colour chart as reference and color correction. But that is a step more complex than just white balance. In the end, if post editing is part of the workflow, AWB vs set value doesn't matter. Just two types of workflow. If the in-camera original is the end result then it highly matters.
One month later since changing this setting I think the quality of my work is better. Best advice I’ve gotten in a while. Thanks Sean for publishing this piece.
I’ve always set my camera on ‘daylight’ just because I was too lazy to always adjust my settings. And didn’t want auto because I never want my camera to make my decisions. Being a landscape / nature photographer, it seems to work out well for me. Thanks for explaining it!!
Not surprisingly as I'm merely an amateur and Sean is one the best there is, I completely subscribe to what he says around minute 9. Perfect white balance robs ambiance but strictly staying at 5500K tends to exaggerate colour-casts the moment the lighting strays in either direction. Now obviously its a matter of personal preference if you want to keep it like that but I too tend to pull back a bit in post or if I remember, in camera. One thing, Sean says RAW has a ton of latitude. He's oversimplifying for our benefit. RAW doesn't actually give a hoot about your white balance setting, that is applied afterwards during RAW conversion so you can put it anywhere you like and it shouldn't affect image quality in the slightest. A bit more information that might interest some - First, daylight temperature depends greatly on where you are shooting. Generally the farther from the equator the further light from the sun has to travel through our atmosphere and this tends to absorb blue light, resulting in natural light at midday that is quite warm. Thus daylight in (say) Birmingham is a good deal warmer in tone that it is in Chennai (latitudes 52 north and 13 north respectively). The midpoint daylight setting in Chennai is not 5500K but 6400K. Shall I ramble on? This at first seems counterintuitive: why is the light in the tropics cool and in the arctic warm? Well perhaps simply because there were misnamed. A blue flame is hotter than a red-orange flame so whilst, if applied correctly, blues should have been called hot and reds cool, it turns out our brains start to break at that point. Because since we lived in caves we've associated a flickering orange fire with warmth and many a proto-human has probably singed his fur on a glowing red ember. Secondly, the interesting bit about daylight colour temperature is the effect it has on human culture. Because blue light is kind of cold and desaturating, can even look slightly metallic, tropical cultures love bright and saturated colours. You see it in the clothes, in the art and in the architectural decoration. And some may notice that the the same pink, green, turquoise and gold saree that looks quite opulent in Colombo looks frankly a bit garish when worn in New York, whilst tourists fresh off the plane from Malmo landing in Bangkok look somewhat wan and anaemic until they start to develop a bit of a tan. Sorry for going on for so long. Colour fascinates me. :) Edit: Just a footnote - I forgot to mention however that I slightly disagree with the bit around minute 12, that our eyes are daylight white balanced. First - daylight where? If I live all my life in Lagos (latitude 6N) it would be quite a handicap to have my eyes biologically set to 5500K. Secondly, most computers and phones you may have noticed have a night light setting to ease eye strain. This is because if you are in a tungsten lit room and someone hands you a sheet of white paper - you see a sheet of white paper. You do not see a sheet of orange paper, your brain (not your eyes) has already made the adjustment for you*. So here's a tip to help those of you who work late at your computers and suffer from eye strain. Hold a white piece of paper next to your monitor and then lower the temperature on your monitor until the screen and the paper look about the same. Second tip, reduce the brightness until that looks about the same too. Your eyes will thank you and as long as you are not doing colour critical work* you will soon forget that you have the night light setting on. *however if they actually handed you a sheet of orange paper your brain might still see it as white. Because it matches the colour of the light, that's the point at which our brain can get fooled. For colour critical work therefore you need balanced lighting or if you know the lighting that will be used by your viewers you should work in similar light. Maybach and Lexus for example have light booths in their main showrooms where they can park the car and change the ambient light to match the light where you live. This way you can see what it will look like when you get it home.
I think if you shoot into the sun with auto white balance at Afternoon when the sun is exactly in the middle of the sky, you would probably get a more accurate number. for me its around 5100k which doesnt make sense but alright
This video has forever changed the way I take photos. Thank you for making it. Your work continues to inspire me on my path to making this my full time profession. Thank you!
In 38 years as a full time pro, I don' think I have ever used Auto White balance. I work in exactly the same way you do, I leave it set to 5600K. The only time I change it is if I have a colour critical job that needs to render truly accurate colours. In that case I use an X-Rite Colour Checker to create custom colour profiles. I've nothing against using auto, its just not what I do. I worked with film for so long, when I changed to digital white balance wasn't really something I thought about. I just used the camera as if it were loaded with daylight balanced film. Great video Sean, I wish more people created content like yours, Thank you.
Maybe its the fact you learned to shoot with daylight balanced film so it just became natural. I leave it in auto, and make camera white balance shift slightly turned to amber. Honestly canon auto wb works good for me, but I want to start shooting at manual because it gives richer colors when set correctly. I will try to keep it at 5500 for street photography, and try to implement that knowledge in my portrait and car shots
My understanding of white balance was poorly lacking, but I did not know why, until now. Your video is a great example of taking an idea that appeared on the periphery (conversation with a friend) and making it into something that will resonate with many people. That is the art of it.
This is an absolute lightbulb (tungsten?!) moment. I've never seen anyone explain their thought process like this and it's going to be my approach from now on. Thank you
The thing here, WB is very different if you shoot RAW and JPEG. It even applies differently in Lightroom depending on the file. If you shoot RAW it doesn’t matter what camera setting you have, you can edit it at pleasure.
5500k is as good a starting place as any for a raw file. if anything this technique might give you a better starting place as a "default" for what the scene looked like. but how it looked to your eyes at the time and how it should look in the finished photo aren't necessarily the same!
You're absolutely right, and he says the same thing by the end of the video; he just feels it's a better starting point for the tweaks you might want to make. For me it makes much sense, since it also tends to save me time at the computer. Of course not always what I saw at the moment of the shooting is the final image I want, but mostly I prefer to be faithful to the reality I perceived then.
Our job as photogs is to create, either in our style or the style desired by the client. For me, the bottom line is WB can be adjusted in post so I don't get too worried about setting in camera, except when I need to represent the actual color as it was during the shoot. So, like Sean, I prefer to stick with the basic 5500K unless there is a need for a specific setting. Love this channel, always a fair, balanced and thoughtful approach to our craft... and Sean just seems like a darn decent human being!
Of course, we all change WB in post when it's desirable. That's not the question. The question is how many pictures you would need to correct in post. When shooting with AWB (which is pretty good even in Sony cameras) you may end up with a few pictures needing correction. When you set it to 5500K you will have hundreds of pictures needing correction.
Sean, you have no idea how much you've helped me with this video. As an amateur photographer, I've always struggled to grasp the concept of white balance, to the point where I just left it on auto mode. Your explanation completely blew my mind, it was incredibly clear and accompanied by simple examples. Thank you SO much for that!
THANK YOU for explaining white balance VISUALLY for us visual learners!! I had a sneaking suspicion about what white balance was in adobe lightroom but didn’t know the mechanics behind it or how to manipulate it real time (not post production)
Recently I've been leaving my big old Sony kit on the shelf in favor of a much smaller fujifilm x100 for travel and life documentation photos. It makes a ton of sense to always shoot fixed WB for daylight on that camera to get a true to my memory shot. Going to be spending more time fixed at 5500k I think! Thanks for the video.
I’ve been shooting with digital cameras for 20 years now and have always used Auto White Balance, assuming I could just make changes in post. Thank you for giving me another way to think about this. I will give it a try for a while. Thanks, Sean, for making the most thoughtful videos out there.
The changes in post are much easier when all your photos start from a consistent point. After shooting in one WB setting for a while you begin to understand much better what changes you can make in post! I love it
@@Millie-um2bi "The changes in post are much easier when all your photos start from a consistent point." I don't think this argument holds water. That's assuming you are shooting in consistent lighting. If not, this is not relevant. And even if it is, it's still something you can just sync across the entire series of shots. If you're in the same spot with same lighting, nothing prevents you from correcting a shot and later syncing that to the exact same value to other shots, and that works regardless if all shots are shot the same or each shot is completely different. Makes no practical difference. Starting from a consistent point in varying light though only means that you are sometimes going to tweak by a lot and sometimes by a little, I don't see how this makes anything easier.
Thanks for sharing this, Sean! I've never considered fixing my white balance this way, but it makes so much sense to do so for street photography. The joy of getting things to look closer to what the eye sees would help me be more happy with what I shoot, and potentially have less edits to make to photos. Thank you so much for sharing your process. Such an eye opener!
Thanks Sean, you’ve put into words an internal struggle I’ve often had setting a custom white balance on my camera by “correcting” the white balance of a sheet of paper or a white ceiling. I’m an amateur and have bought into the mantra that white must always look white, which in my heart I knew was wrong but never before realised why. Thank you.
"But raw files have a ton of latitude" - Not super important here, but WB settings or auto-WB do not affect the raw file at all, data captured is the same regardless. It will affect what is loaded into your processing application though.
I just wrote basically the same comment. The latitude part refers to exposure, but WB changes have zero effect on the quality of the file. It's not baking in.
Sean has mastered the art of teaching as well as he's mastered the art of shooting. Always an informative pleasure listening to his well thought out explanations. I learn something every time.
Was out shooting yesterday and spent a good 2 hours searching for a proper white balance because I felt the auto settings were hindering my creativity, then you drop this video a day later. Right on time.
@@markankone9362 why not just put the camera in auto and fix it in Lightroom or photoshop in a second. Story and composition and character are surely what is important.
@@LASHMAR I suppose a better word is "experimenting" for a proper white balance? Yesterday I shot throughout the day in NYC, experimenting "in search of a proper white balance" of my liking, however, I came away undecided still due to my lacking a firm understanding of white balance.
I leave it parked at 5200K, and shoot RAW so I can non-destructively change the white balance afterwards. You are losing NOTHING by changing RAW images afterwards, the in-camera settings are all just a viewing filter AFTER the data. This includes saturation, contrast, and sharpening. I actually leave those settings at weak levels (-4) in camera so that I deliberately choose their values later. However, in the case of white balance if I am indoors for a length of time I will adjust the white balance in camera because the images on the camera look even more yellow than real life. Matching your viewfinder or screen to real life can be a good technique. For video it is more important to get the white balance right, because it IS baked into the file (except for RAW video), and while you can change it that process is destructive (but you probably won't notice).
Good to know I'm not alone with this idea. I do the same and very rarely change the WB in my postprocessing work. I appreciate your time and effort making this for us.
I've used this method for several years now in my creative work. It's incredibly practical for multiple reasons. Love your explanations and your teaching method. Thanks for creating so much awesome content over all these years!
I’ve been working in broadcast TV for a number of years and this is how we shoot - WB is set to 5600 and left, so they have the latitude in the edit but mostly because they want the scene to look how it was, especially in factual entertainment where it needs to appear as it was at the time. Good video though and a supporter of the theory here 🤙
As a beginner amateur photographer that barley knows how to shot manual. This makes absolutely freaking sense to me. I sometimes wonder why my pictures do not look like the scene I have. This is a trick I'll incorporate into my arsenal. Thank you.
No, you're approach isn't odd. A lot of us that started back in the film days shoot this way. There's nothing funnier than watching some young guy drag himself out of bed at stupid o'clock to photograph a sunrise, and end up with bland grey light, because they're wedded to auto-white balance. More than half of natural light photography is about capturing colour casts, and a good slice of strobe photography is about simulating them, and nothing kills it so well as auto white balance.
Auto WB doesn't kill anything, what kills is that people are adamant about keeping the white point exactly neutral. Which makes for "accurate" but boring images. Shooting with Auto WB doesn't prevent anyone from changing the value later, it's also worth noting that most new cameras actually have 2 different AutoWB modes where one intends to keep things as neutral as possible and the other intends to keep the ambiance of the shot intact. If it's warm, it leaves it warm, if it's cool, it will leave it as such. This works very well and it is a big difference between the 2 modes.
Fantastic breakdown🔥 this was exactly the approach i've been using as well, always thought it makes more sense to preserve the actual tone and mood of the scene, glad i'm not the only one!
Thank you a lot, this has been probably the best explanation of what balance is and how it works in camera and, most importantly, the different scenarios and the effect of choosing one setting vs the other. Greatly appreciated.
The best instruction I have ever received on RU-vid! I learn so much on this platform, but this is totally next level. I just ordered your digital library complete. Thank you so much!
As a wedding photographer, I subscribed when you said wedding photographers may not have time to fiddle with settings. I’ve shot a thousand+ weddings, and white balance isn’t something I need to get perfect on the day of, but it is something that constantly occupies 10% of my brainpower. Sometimes setting WB to auto allows me to put 100% of my creative energy into posing, composition, finding the perfect moment. It’s a RAW file anyway, and our editors will ALWAYS edit for proper skin tones. Great video!
I'm a glad people are thinking more about how the camera interprets colors in their images! I would be careful with using white balance as a creative control though. White balance is used to control the center of the colors captured by the camera for all other color controls (e.g. saturation, hue, etc.). Definitely change the colors in your images in creative ways that depart from reality, just be careful with which controls you are using (and understand the impacts between the sliders)!
Great introduction to the concept. One of the clearest I've seen I reckon. I just want to mention (if anyone sees this!) that the actual data in a RAW file is completely unaffected by the white balance set in camera - that's only a bit of metadata. So you're really not loosing anything, from a technical perspective, by changing it in post. Video is different though.
In short, white balance in digital photography is a technical setting for the demozaicing tool to compute correctly the colors of the image. Usually, the post-processing tool (Lightroom for example) fetches the temperature from the RAW metadata to use it by default and automatically while demozaicing the RAW. Usually, it is recommended to use color grading tools for color correction, and to use the white balance tool for adjusting a little (or correcting if the default setting is wrong) the white balance as any color retouch afterward will impact the way the saturation/chroma, the brightness/lightness, and the tint will move in the working color space of the post-processing application when playing with the colors of the image. Indeed, playing directly with the white balance can give us a more straightforward result for our taste. But don't forget it will also impact the way the color properties will behave in the working color space when we'll play a little with them for some secondary color corrections.
Thank you for challenging photographers to think and decide for themselves. I recently went through this exact thought process, and I too found myself locking my camera on a daylight white balance. Thanks again for your thought provoking approach.
I have the same approach... I've gone out mid-day on a sunny day and captured a custom white balance that I feel accurately reproduces the scene, and just leave it at that. It's not 5500, but around 5300, but more importantly it corrects the green-magenta axis for me. I can always adjust the white balance later, and sometimes it does require some adjusting. There are times at sunset where I bring it a little warmer, or in the blue hour / night where I bring it down a little cooler.
very happy to see someone made this video, for years I shot film never worring about white balance. Then in digital I would leave it in auto, and found myself in post processing thinking to myself, im sure this scene was warmer or cooler, and would faff about trying to remember what the lighting was actually like. ButFor the last years 5 or so I have left all my cameras at 5500ish and one on cloudy and not changed them. So much easier. Particularly when you're trying to get a consistent look across multiple images.
Sean, tomorrow I am heading out the door with my white balance set on daylight. Yes, there have been moments in the past where I came home with some very strange colors. Never quite understood why. And tomorrow as day turns to night, I am leaving the daylight settings and will be watching for what happens. Thanks for this. By the way, I have been listening to your lectures for quite a long time. I have learned so much from you, not the least of which is to pay more attention to what effect I want than what others are speaking about what they want. Freedom. You are about freedom.
I like the philosophy of using daylight as a baseline. I stumbled into it accidentally, having set it manually for some flash photography and then forgetting to reset it when going out. I prefer auto when I'm just taking snaps around my house or at a family gathering, but out and about I think daylight is easier to work from. Another aspect where I think fixing to daylight WB for night photography improves the output is Tint. Even when the camera gets the Blue/Yellow mix "right", I've found that it tends to make images that are too green or magenta, especially if there are fluorescents in the mix.
Very interesting video on the subject, thanks! I'd like to add one thing. White balance correction was widely used before digital photography. For colour negative film, it was set at the enlarger with a colour mixing head. Or in your scanner software if you didn't print in the darkroom. With colour positives, on the other hand, you had to use filters on the lens of your camera, depending on the ambient lighting. But I don't think many people did that... And there were a lot more film stocks in those days, both daylight and tungsten.
First time viewer Sean, probably the best WB explanation. I was trying to reset my WB for an outing yesterday, but now have reset both of my cameras to 5500 & will give it a try.
My first thought early in the video was that you would like daylight film. That is where I started and I didn’t learn or understand white balance when I first moved to digital photography.
I like the way you explain it it's easy you can comprehend what you're saying I can comprehend what you're saying and I understand you totally you're a genius
What a marvellous way of teaching a basic technique in a simple way for understanding. It’s always a pleasure to watch your videos Sean! Thanks for sharing
Thanks for the video Sean - I've been into photography for more than 4 decades, developing my own B&W films etc but never thought about the colour temp setting on my digital kit.
Excellent advice. This is probably an area that many people never think about. Color balance can make an amazing difference in the look of your image. Thank you.
What I love about out you Sean, is that you are always in service to others. I hope you know just how much you are appreciated. This is the first time I’ve had the concept and use of white balance explained in this way and it makes so much sense. Keep doing what you’re doing! Parable Volume 3 is on its way to me and I’m anxious to see what you’ve been up to.
Thank you for this tip, it has been a life saver. I’ve always struggled to get my pictures to look as my eyes see the scene since moving to Sony and this has fixed 90% of the problem. Everything looks more realistic and as intended.
I was actually thinking these days about the white balance of film photography, and questioning why not do the same with my digital camera and set it to daylight always. Awesome, this video gave me the answer to that question. Thank you Sean.
I really appreciate this video. I rarely re-watch a video like this, but I've experimented and have since set my cameras all into a set white balance and really appreciate how it's positively affected the colors in the pictures I've taken since. It also put into my mind that if the colors in an image i've shot previous to this seem off when I look back on it to reset my white balance in Capture One or Lightroom before making adjustments and find that often gets me much closer to what I remember when I took the picture.
Thanks for this Sean, I have shot for a few years and never really understood white balance. I didn't really pay attention to it. Now after your video, I have switched off AWB in all my cameras. I am looking forward to see the changes.
A tightly edited and thought-provoking video. This, and your last episode about Phil Sharp, are some of the most useful video’s I’ve seen in recent months. All the best.
I always come back to this video. It is brilliant. Just got a new Panasonic GX85 w/ a Leica/Panasonic 15mm (30 equivalent) lens. I decided on 5600k white balance. Thank you as always! Brilliant videos.
I often struggle with my pre-dawn and sunrise photos not looking right, the way I saw it at the shoot. I always let the camera "auto" white balance, or tried a grey card, (which never worked). That is, until now! I'm certainly going to try this on my next venture. Thanks Sean!
Thanks ....finally understand WB....So much so...just grabbed the camera and changed the setting....cant believe it after all this time ...and it took till now to discover the problem i had understanding what was happening with taking shots that had nothing to do with what i as seeing .....have just subscribed and look forward to learning more from you ....Thanks again
This is the absolute best white balance video I’ve come across. You sir are a master teacher. The simplification of a seemingly complex topic? Wow. Thank you. And your work is an inspiration 💗
Love this, I've watched it twice. Interestingly, your point here also crops up in relation to AI. Topaz has a software product: Photo AI. It looks at your image and suggests a number of opperations to run. I never choose color or lighting "correction" because of exactly what you mention here, I don't want someone's idea of a perfect white balance. Great work, Sean. You are a natural teacher.
Very clear explanations and loved the visual examples. I’m a slightly experienced hobbyist and this helped me pinpoint why I intuitively like certain looks. Definitely capturing what your eye is seeing is important. It’s frustrating to find myself fixing an image in Photoshop just to recreate the colors that made me want to take the photo in the first place. I futz around with my WB settings (when I remember to do it) but I’m certainly going to try this set and sort of forget it technique.
Thank you for this valuable information. Never thought of white balance as you presented. As one who struggles with the "correct" white balance i want my images to match what I actually saw when i created them. This is inspiring.
I‘m actually doing pretty much the same thing, I‘m always leaving my camera at 5200, mostly because I can always change it in Lr later with almost no loss, but also because of the reason you do it that way. Great video!
