What Is White Balance?

White balance is the camera setting that tells the camera what color the light is, so that things that are white in front of you come out white in the photo instead of orange, blue or green. It matters because light is almost never pure white: a lamp is orange, shade is blue, some tubes are green, and the camera records that color on everything it lights unless you tell it what to remove.

The motel above shows the problem in one frame. The rooms are lit by warm lamps, the sign and the ceiling by green light, and the outside of the building by the cool sky after sunset. A white card held in each of those places would record as a different color, and a single white balance setting can make only one of them white. Choosing which one, or choosing none, is what this setting is for.

Why your eyes cope with colored light and your camera does not

Human vision performs color constancy automatically. A sheet of paper looks white to you under a candle, under an overcast sky or under an office tube, because your brain keeps judging the color of the light and discounting it.

A camera sensor has no such habit. It counts the light that reaches it, red, green and blue, and nothing more. Under a household bulb that light has far more red than blue, so the paper is recorded as orange. In open shade, lit only by blue sky, it is recorded as blue. The paper did not change; the light did. White balance is the instruction that tells the camera, or your RAW editor, what color the light was, so it can take that color back out and leave the paper white.

Kelvin: the number that describes the light

The color of light is described in kelvin (K), a temperature scale borrowed from heated metal, which glows red, then orange, then white, then bluish as it gets hotter. Low numbers describe warm, orange light and high numbers cool, blue light, the opposite of how "warm" and "cool" sound.

A map of common light, from warmest to coolest. These are typical figures; real sources vary.

• 1800 to 2000K: candle flame and firelight, deep orange.
• 2700 to 3200K: household incandescent and tungsten bulbs, and LED bulbs sold as "warm white", orange-yellow.
• 3000 to 4000K: low sun in the hour after sunrise and before sunset, golden, and lower still right at the horizon.
• 5000 to 5600K: direct sun in the middle of the day, close to neutral, and the color a flash is built to match.
• 6000 to 7500K: overcast sky, slightly cool.
• 7000 to 10,000K: open shade on a clear day, lit only by blue sky, distinctly blue.
• Fluorescent and LED lamps: anywhere from about 2700 to 6500K depending on the lamp, often with a green or magenta lean that kelvin does not describe.

The sun and the sky are two different lights. Direct sun is warm; the blue sky that fills the shadows is cool. On a clear day, anything in shadow is lit mainly by the sky, which is why shadows on snow look blue.

Only sources that glow from heat, like the sun, flames and incandescent bulbs, truly have a color temperature. For fluorescent tubes, LEDs and streetlights the number is a "correlated" color temperature, the nearest match on the scale. Their light can have peaks and gaps no glowing object has, which is why they often carry a green or magenta tint too.

Kelvin steps are also not even. The mired (one million divided by the kelvin value) spaces the scale much more evenly, closer to how the eye sees color change. Going from 3000K to 3500K is about 48 mireds; going from 6500K to 7000K is about 11. So when you fine tune by number, small kelvin changes matter under lamps and big ones are needed in shade.

Want the unit and the physics behind it on their own? Color temperature covers what the numbers measure, and kelvin covers the unit itself.

Which way the kelvin dial turns, and why it feels backward

This confuses almost everyone who sets white balance by number: setting a higher kelvin value on the camera makes the photo warmer, not cooler.

It makes sense once you remember what the dial means. It is not the color you want the photo to be. It is the color you are telling the camera the light already is, so it can remove it. Dial in 8000K and you are saying "this light is very blue", so the camera adds orange to cancel the blue it now believes is there. Dial in 3000K and you are saying "this light is very orange", so it adds blue. The light has not changed; only the camera's assumption has.

The rule that follows: when the setting matches the light, neutrals come out neutral. When the setting is lower than the light, the photo goes blue. When it is higher, the photo goes orange. Fixing a shot by number is then simple: too blue, raise the kelvin; too orange, lower it.

The diagonal is where the setting matches the light. Every cell to its right comes out orange, every cell to its left blue.

The quickest way to feel the dial is to fix the color yourself. Pick the light, then drag the kelvin and tint until the whites look white.

Want the other challenges? The full camera simulator has all 21, across eight scenes.

What white balance does to the red, green and blue numbers

Under the menu names, white balance is plain multiplication. The camera records three numbers for every point: how much red, green and blue light arrived. A neutral grey or white object should have three equal numbers. Colored light makes them unequal, and white balance multiplies the red and blue channels until a neutral object reads equal again. The same multipliers are then applied to every pixel in the frame.

A simplified example with a grey card, in 0 to 255 values. Real cameras do this on the raw sensor data with different starting numbers, but the logic is the same.

The arithmetic: 200 × 0.8 = 160 and 100 × 1.6 = 160, so the lamp-lit card becomes equal in all three channels. The same multipliers on a card that was already neutral give 160 × 0.8 = 128 and 160 × 1.6 = 256, which is past the 255 ceiling of an 8-bit file.

Three practical facts follow:

• Strong correction costs a little noise. Under lamp light the blue channel received little light and is multiplied up, so its noise is multiplied too.
• White balance can clip a channel. A bright, saturated area can be pushed over the top in one channel, losing detail there even though the overall exposure did not change. A per-channel histogram shows it; the brightness-only one may not.
• White balance is not exposure. It changes the balance between channels, not how much light was captured.

An editor's white balance eyedropper does exactly this sum for you: click something that should be neutral and it picks the multipliers that make its three numbers equal.

White balance presets and their kelvin values

Every camera has presets that fix the white balance at a typical value for common light. The number is the light the preset assumes, and the correction it applies goes the opposite way. Exact values vary a little between cameras.

• Tungsten or Incandescent: Light it assumes (typical): 2800 to 3200K. What it does to the image: Adds strong blue to cancel the orange of household bulbs.
• Fluorescent: Light it assumes (typical): 3800 to 4500K. What it does to the image: Adds some blue and a magenta shift to cancel the green of many tubes.
• Daylight or Sunny: Light it assumes (typical): 5200 to 5500K. What it does to the image: Close to no correction; the baseline the others are measured from.
• Flash: Light it assumes (typical): 5500 to 6000K. What it does to the image: Slight warming to match the near-daylight color of flash.
• Cloudy: Light it assumes (typical): 6000 to 6500K. What it does to the image: Adds mild warmth to cancel the blue of an overcast sky.
• Shade: Light it assumes (typical): 7000 to 8000K. What it does to the image: Adds stronger warmth to cancel the blue of open shade.
• Auto: Light it assumes (typical): Chosen per frame. What it does to the image: The camera estimates the light from the picture itself.
• Custom or Kelvin: Light it assumes (typical): Measured, or dialed. What it does to the image: Uses a reference shot of a neutral card, or the number you set.

Read the presets as a ladder from cool to warm: Tungsten, Fluorescent, Daylight, Flash, Cloudy, Shade. If a frame looks too blue, step down the ladder toward Cloudy and Shade; if it looks too orange, step up toward Tungsten. When a preset gets close but not quite there, switch to kelvin and fine tune from that preset's number.

Daylight is the honest setting: a sunrise stays warm and a twilight scene stays blue. Fluorescent is the least reliable, because tubes vary so much. In live view or an electronic viewfinder you can watch each preset change the scene before you take a frame.

Auto white balance: when it works and when it fails

Auto white balance estimates the light from the picture itself, broadly by looking for areas that are probably white or grey, or by assuming the scene averages out to neutral. It is a sensible default when the light keeps changing faster than you can change a setting.

It fails in predictable ways:

• One dominant color. A frame filled with green leaves, orange sand or a red wall looks to the camera like colored light, so it "corrects" the color that was the subject. Auto can add magenta to a forest and drain a sunset of the warmth you came for.
• Nothing neutral in the frame. With no white or grey to anchor on, the estimate is a guess. A white object in the corner of the frame often changes the result.
• Light that is itself colored. With neon, stage lights and colored LEDs, the color is the scene.
• Very warm light. Many cameras deliberately leave some warmth under candles and lamps rather than correcting fully, and some offer an Auto variant that keeps more or less of it.
• A series that must match. Auto decides again for every frame. For a panorama, a bracketed set, a product series or a time-lapse, set one fixed value so every frame matches.

When Auto fails, choose Daylight or a fixed kelvin value, or measure the light yourself with a grey card.

Setting a custom white balance from a grey card

For accurate, repeatable color in light that stays the same, measure it. Photograph a neutral grey or white card under the light your subject is in, and let the camera build its correction from that measurement instead of a guess.

1. Put the card in the same light as your subject, facing the same way, close to where the subject is.
2. Photograph it so it fills most of the frame. Exposure should be roughly right and must not clip to pure white, because a clipped card has no color left to measure.
3. In the white balance menu choose Custom (some cameras call it Preset Manual or PRE) and select that frame as the reference.
4. Shoot with the custom setting for as long as the light stays the same, and measure again when it changes.

Many cameras store several custom values, so a room you return to can be measured once and recalled. The same card works in an editor: shoot one frame of it under the light, click the white balance eyedropper on the card, and copy that correction to every photo taken under the same light.

Details that matter:

• Use something truly neutral. A proper grey card is made to be neutral. Printer paper often contains brighteners that glow slightly blue in daylight, which pushes the result a touch warm. A white wall may be painted cream.
• Sample an area, not a pixel. Noise makes single pixels colored even on a grey card, so set the eyedropper to average a small area, such as 5 by 5 pixels.
• A grey card fixes neutrals, not every color. It makes greys grey. Whether a red dress comes out exactly right is a separate matter of the camera's color rendering.

A grey card sets neutral, but what about accurate color across every hue? How to use a color chart shows how a chart builds a profile for your camera, and the gray card page covers the card itself.

Temperature and tint: the green to magenta axis

Kelvin moves color along one line only, from blue to orange. Light can also lean green or magenta, and that is a separate control called tint. Many fluorescent tubes and cheaper LEDs cast green, which no kelvin value can cancel; adding magenta can. Set the temperature first, then nudge tint until neutral objects stop looking green or pink. Skin is a sensitive test: a slight green tint makes people look unwell long before it shows anywhere else.

Some light cannot be fixed at all. A low-pressure sodium streetlight, the old deep yellow kind, puts out almost all its light in one narrow band of yellow-orange. There is almost no blue or green in it to recover, so no white balance setting can turn it into normal color; it can only make the yellow grey. The more common orange sodium lamps are a little better but still leave colors dull. Some cheap LEDs have gaps of their own, and colors the light does not contain stay dull whatever you set. Add your own light, accept the color as part of the place, or convert to black and white.

In editing, set white balance before any other color work. A color cast changes how every later adjustment behaves.

RAW, JPEG and when white balance gets baked in

A RAW file stores the sensor data untouched, with the white balance saved alongside it as an instruction. Change it later and the editor simply applies new multipliers to the same data, with the same quality as if you had set it right in camera.

A JPEG has the multipliers applied, the colors converted and the file compressed at the moment you press the shutter. You can still warm or cool it afterward, but you are pushing around finished 8-bit values. Small corrections are fine. Large ones bring out banding in skies and cannot recover a channel that was already clipped.

So: if you shoot JPEG, get white balance right in camera. If you shoot RAW, you can defer the decision, but it is still worth setting it roughly right: the back screen shows believable color, the histogram and highlight warnings are calculated from that white balanced preview, and the edit starts close to where it should end.

Wondering what else the file format changes? RAW vs JPEG compares the two, and RAW explains what a RAW file holds.

Mixed light: choosing which source is right

A single white balance setting can correct only one color of light. A room lit by a lamp and a window has two: roughly 2700 to 3000K near the lamp and often 6500K or more from the window, since window light on a clear day is largely blue sky rather than direct sun. Correct for one and the other goes blue or orange. The motel at the top of this page has three such sources at once.

Ways to handle it, in the order worth trying:

• Remove a source. Close the curtain, switch off the lamp, or move the subject so one light dominates.
• Serve the light on your subject. Set white balance for whatever light falls on the main subject, usually a face, and let the rest of the frame go warm or cool.
• Match the sources. Put a colored filter, called a gel, over the smaller light so it matches the bigger one, then set white balance for that shared color. An orange gel on a flash makes it match lamp light indoors.
• Correct locally in editing. A brush or gradient can warm or cool one part of the frame while leaving the rest alone.

Splitting the difference with a middle value rarely satisfies either source. Often the better answer is to keep the contrast. Warm windows against a blue dusk, as in the motel photo, is one of the most reliable color pairings in photography, and it exists only because the camera was not asked to neutralize both.

Need to rescue a frame lit by two kinds of light? How to fix mixed light in post walks through correcting it after the shot, and gel explains the colored filters that match one light to another.

Creative white balance: when correct is not neutral

Nothing requires white balance to be neutral. Golden hour is supposed to look golden, blue hour blue, and a candlelit dinner corrected to grey has lost what made it worth photographing.

The dunes keep their gold because the camera was not told to remove it. Let Auto chase neutral, or set a low kelvin value, and the sand can turn pale and the evening disappear. To push warmth further, choose Cloudy or Shade, or a higher kelvin number: you are telling the camera the light is bluer than it is, so it adds extra orange. To make a scene colder, go the other way. Tungsten in daylight gives a strong blue cast, a common deliberate look for night, winter or unease.

Try it in the camera simulator: set a white balance at least 1500K warmer than the light falling on the landscape, and watch it turn golden on purpose.

Pale ground, snow and mist are the clearest test. Having little color of their own, they show the color of the light. After sunset that light is blue sky, and keeping it blue is what tells the viewer what time it was.

The test is intent: a shift that serves the mood is a choice, and one left over from last night's preset is a mistake.

Try reading a cast before you set one. Which of these two photos has the warmer color? They are different scenes, so this trains your eye to read the light, not to compare settings.

Which photo has a warmer color cast?

A B

Looking for the natural light that is already warm or cool? Golden hour and blue hour are the two times of day when the color of light does most of the work for you.

Choosing white balance by kind of shot

• Portraits: judge on the face first, since a wrong skin tone is the first thing anyone notices. A slight warm lean, such as the Cloudy preset in shade, often flatters skin, but check that it has not drifted green or magenta.
• Landscapes: Daylight or a fixed kelvin value keeps the color of the light as it was. Keep the gold at golden hour, and keep mist, snow and twilight cool.
• Indoors under lamps: Tungsten or about 3000K, then decide how much warmth to leave. Camera settings for indoor photography covers the rest of the exposure.
• Night and city lights: streetlights, shop signs and sky are all different colors, so pick the one that matters and let the rest go. Photographing neon signs covers the most extreme case.
• Products and art copying: a custom setting from a grey card, held fixed for the whole set.
• Events: light changes without warning, so Auto with RAW is practical, then match the set in editing. Editing photos consistently shows how to bring a series into line.

Common mistakes with white balance

• Thinking a higher kelvin number makes the photo cooler. On the camera dial it makes the photo warmer, because the number describes the light you are cancelling, not the look you get.
• Treating Auto as correct. It is an estimate. A scene full of one color, or with no neutral in it, fools it, and it changes its mind from frame to frame.
• Leaving a preset on after the light changes. Walk outside with Tungsten still set and every frame turns blue. Check it whenever you change location.
• Trying to fix every cast with temperature. Green and magenta live on the tint axis. If a kelvin change makes a frame orange or blue but never neutral, the problem is tint.
• Correcting warmth that was the point. Neutral is not the same as right.
• Believing RAW means white balance does not matter. It does not change the captured data, but it drives the preview, the histogram and the highlight warnings you use to judge the shot.
• Judging color on an uncalibrated screen. A blue-tinted laptop will lead you to warm every photo. Monitor calibration takes that guess out.

Try this: one grey card, four settings, ten minutes

You need plain white or grey paper (a grey card is better), a colorful object such as a piece of fruit, and a room with a lamp and a window. A phone works if its camera app lets you set white balance.

1. Lamp only. Close the curtains, turn on a household lamp, and put the paper and the object under it. Shoot the same framing at Daylight, Tungsten, Shade and Auto.
2. Window only. Turn off the lamp, open the curtains, and shoot the same four settings in window light.
3. Both. Put the paper where both lights reach it, so one edge faces the window and the other the lamp. Shoot at Tungsten and at Daylight.
4. Measure. If your camera has a custom setting, measure the lamp-lit paper and shoot once more.

How to judge it: line the frames up and find, for each light, the one where the paper looks most like paper. Check it against the table near the top: under the lamp, Daylight should be orange and Tungsten close to neutral; in the window, Tungsten should be strongly blue. In the mixed frame, notice that one edge of the paper is always wrong; that is the mixed light problem in miniature. Finally, compare Auto with the measured shot: if Auto left the lamp-lit paper warm, your camera keeps some warmth on purpose, and now you know how much.

White balance questions

What is white balance in photography?

It is the setting that tells the camera the color of the light, so whites and greys come out neutral instead of tinted orange, blue or green. Without it the camera records the color of the light along with the color of the subject.

Why does a higher kelvin setting make my photo more orange?

Because the setting describes the light, not the result. A high number tells the camera the light is very blue, so it adds orange to cancel it. If the light was not actually that blue, the added orange shows.

Is white balance the same as color temperature?

No. Color temperature is a property of the light, measured in kelvin. White balance is the correction the camera or editor applies, which uses a kelvin value for the blue to orange axis plus a tint value for green to magenta.

Should I use Auto white balance or set it myself?

Auto is a good default when the light keeps changing, especially if you shoot RAW. Set it yourself when Auto keeps getting a scene wrong, when warm or cool light is the point of the picture, or when a series of frames must match. If you want to check what stuck from this page, try the white balance and color temperature quiz.