Understanding the White Balance

What is white balance(WB)?

It all about the concept of color temperature. Color temperature is a way of measuring the quality of a light source. It is based on the ratio of the amount of blue light to the amount of red light, and the green light is ignored.

Setting Auto White Balance on the right-hand-side

Adjusting White Balance
In sunlight, under incandescent lights or in other conditions where the color of white takes on a reddish or bluish tinge, this item adjusts to the color of white which is closest to what is seen by the eye in accordance with the light source.

Most people just think setting to "Auto White Balance" it will handle everything.

Cool and warm mood presented due to different colour temperature used.

Some camera has better custom setting, thus you can prepare your preference if you set your little own studio. My Lumix GF5 has pretty good setting feature:

Besides normal auto white balance and some other common conditions, it also offer the white balance on flash for motion picture, two manually setting and 1 preset. I also can adjust the Orange, Red, Green, Blue in the setting as followed:

Don't worry about this setting, I will suggest this setting only when you are taking many colourful product at the same time in the studio light setting, then you can use this finely adjusting WB feature. But this is amazing how the small Lumix mirrorless camera can offer so much features.

Actually, there are over few hundreds commands and features for each digital camera, I will try to explain it in the coming topic "Back to the Fundamental"