Incandescent lighting, also called tungsten lighting after the metal filament in the bulb, is the warm, orange-toned light produced by traditional household bulbs and many studio hot lights. It glows at a color temperature of roughly 2700 to 3200 kelvin, far warmer than midday daylight at around 5500K, which is why a room lit by these bulbs looks cozy and amber to the camera even when it appears neutral to the eye.
The eye adapts to this warmth automatically, but the camera does not, so without correction photos under incandescent light come out heavily orange. The fix is white balance. Selecting the Tungsten or Incandescent white balance preset, which targets about 3200 kelvin, adds cooling blue to cancel the orange and restore neutral color. Shooting RAW lets you set this precisely after the fact rather than committing to a preset in the field.
In the studio, tungsten refers to a whole class of continuous hot lights, including halogen versions, valued for letting you see exactly how the light falls before you shoot. They are inexpensive and fully dimmable, but they run extremely hot and, importantly, shift even warmer as they are dimmed, which can complicate color when several lamps are set to different levels. They are a traditional form of continuous lighting.
Tungsten light renders color well, with a high color rendering index, so skin and fabrics look natural once white balance is corrected, which is part of why it remained a film and studio standard for so long. The warmth itself is sometimes desirable, lending a homely glow that photographers preserve deliberately rather than neutralizing.
The trickiest situations are mixed lighting, where tungsten lamps share a scene with cooler daylight from a window or with flash balanced to daylight. No single white balance can correct both at once, so part of the frame will skew orange or blue. The classic solution is to gel the source, placing a color-correction gel such as a blue CTB over the tungsten light to match daylight, or an orange CTO over a flash to match the tungsten, after which a single white balance works cleanly across the frame.
LED panels have largely replaced tungsten on modern sets because they run cool, sip power, and hold their color when dimmed, but understanding tungsten remains essential, since its warm signature still appears in homes, restaurants, street scenes, and any time an old bulb or warm practical lamp lights the ambient scene.
When you encounter tungsten light, the quickest path to natural color is to shoot raw and set white balance afterward, or to use the Tungsten preset and fine-tune from there. If the warmth is part of the mood, as in a candlelit interior, resist neutralizing it completely, since a little residual warmth often looks more honest than a clinically corrected frame.