(Camera: Samsung WB600 with Incandescent Lamp WB)If you always believe that the white balance settings are primarily for enabling a digital camera to render a scene correctly, you are downright mistaken. And you have missed lots of otherwise keepers too.
Digital cameras these days can perfectly gauge the lighting for the "desirable" white balance setting. While this spares photographers the trouble to manually tweak the white balance, the downside is that the final image may simply fall flat when the environmental lights and therefore colours in the actual scene are but boring.
So, here are the author's usual ways to make better use of the white balance settings
- Use the Incandescent Lamp (usually indicated by a light-bulb icon) setting to add a bluish cast to the image for a sense of calmness or coolness which, if expressed in Kelvin Scale, is in the range of 7,000 to 11,000k.
- This works best for night scenes.
- Use the Incandescent Lamp (usually indicated by a light-bulb icon) setting to add a bluish cast to the image for a sense of calmness or coolness which, if expressed in Kelvin Scale, is in the range of 7,000 to 11,000k.
- This works best for night scenes.
(WB600 with Cloudy WB at midday)- Use the Cloudy WB to give the image an overall warmer feel. The colours will even look richer. This trick works best if you are shooting outdoors around midday when everything on earth looks pale. Left on AWB, your camera will reproduce images in exactly the same paleness.
- People not knowing the trick will think that the images taken on Cloudy WB were done in the early morning or early evening. Try it at a swimming pool and the colour of the final images may surprise you.
- People not knowing the trick will think that the images taken on Cloudy WB were done in the early morning or early evening. Try it at a swimming pool and the colour of the final images may surprise you.
- Actually, some photographers leave the WB setting on Cloudy all the time. This is comparable to using a 81A or 81B colour corrective filter to warm the bluish tone.
- If you are not sure about whether this will work the way you want, shoot in RAW so that you can have the leeway to do the post-processing as the WB is not "locked-in" in RAW images.
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