CAM · Camera Settings
White Balance Explained: Kelvin, Presets and Custom
How white balance works, what the Kelvin presets mean, and how to stop orange indoor photos and blue shade photos for good.
Diagrams
White balance tells the camera what colour the light is, so that a white shirt stays white instead of turning orange under a lamp or blue in open shade. Every light source has a colour temperature measured in Kelvin, and the camera needs to know roughly where on that scale your scene sits.
It is one of the few settings that is both a technical correction and an expressive choice, which is why it causes so much confusion. Get the correction right and the colours behave; then decide, deliberately, how warm or cool you want the picture to feel.
Kelvin and the Direction of Correction
Colour temperature runs from the warm end, around 2000K for candlelight, to the cool end, around 10000K for deep shade. The counter-intuitive part is the direction of the correction: selecting a low Kelvin value tells the camera the light is warm, so it cools the image down, while selecting a high value such as Shade warms the picture up.
That is why the classic mistake, leaving the camera on Daylight indoors, produces ugly orange casts. The camera has been told the light is neutral daylight, so it does nothing, and the tungsten light stays orange.
Once you internalise the direction, the whole setting becomes predictable: choose the value that describes the light you are actually standing in, and the camera will compensate for it.
The Presets and When to Override Them
The presets map to typical values: Tungsten or Incandescent around 3200K, Fluorescent around 4000K, Daylight around 5200-5500K, Flash around 5500K, Cloudy around 6000K and Shade around 7000K. Daylight, Cloudy and Shade are the safe outdoor choices: match the preset to the conditions and colours stay neutral.
Auto WB is convenient and usually decent outdoors, but it drifts between frames as the composition changes. In a time-lapse or a burst sequence, that drift shows up as flickering colour, and in a video it is visible as a slow colour shift that is very hard to fix afterwards.
Fluorescent is the preset most likely to disappoint, because domestic fluorescent tubes vary widely and often have a green cast that the preset only partly corrects. If a room looks green after setting Fluorescent, nudge the tint towards magenta.
Custom White Balance With a Grey Card
For product, catalogue and copy work, set a custom white balance with a grey card or a white-balance card: fill the frame with the card under the actual lighting and let the camera measure it. The result is consistent across a whole shoot, which matters more than absolute accuracy when images will be seen side by side.
A grey card is better than a white sheet of paper for this, because paper often contains optical brighteners that make it slightly blue and can bias the reading. If you do not have a card, anything genuinely neutral in the scene will do: concrete, asphalt or a white shirt that you know is white.
Do this once per lighting setup rather than once per photograph. The reading can then be saved as a custom preset, which keeps a whole product series consistent without you having to think about colour again for the rest of the session.
Mixed Lighting: The Hard Case
Studio lights and mixed lighting defeat every preset. A room lit by daylight through a window and a ceiling bulb at the same time contains two light sources of different colours, and no single white balance can be correct for both. Set it for one and the other goes orange or blue.
The practical answer is to remove one of them: turn the ceiling lights off and use the window, or close the curtain and use the room lights. Where that is impossible, decide which source lights the subject's face and set the white balance for that one, then let the background take the colour cast.
Gelling a flash to match the ambient light, or fitting a correction gel to a lamp, is the professional solution in event work. For the rest of us, the useful habit is simply to notice that two colours are present before blaming the camera for a colour problem it cannot solve.
RAW or JPEG, and White Balance as a Choice
If you shoot RAW, precision at capture matters far less, because you can pick any Kelvin value later without losing quality and sample a known neutral with the eyedropper. It is still worth setting the camera close to correct, because the preview you judge composition on is affected by it.
JPEG, by contrast, bakes the colour in. Pushing a JPEG two stops warmer quickly reveals banding and orange skin, and shadow areas start to break up. If you shoot JPEG for speed or file size, getting white balance right in camera is not optional, it is the setting that matters most.
Finally, remember that white balance is also a creative tool. Slightly warm at 5500-6000K flatters skin and sunsets, while slightly cool at 4000-4500K suits blue hour, fog and night cityscapes and makes neon feel colder and more cinematic. Decide the mood, then choose the number.
Key points
- Preset reference values: Tungsten 3200K, Fluorescent 4000K, Daylight 5200-5500K, Cloudy 6000K, Shade 7000K.
- A lower Kelvin setting makes the photo cooler, not warmer - pick Tungsten indoors to cancel the orange cast.
- Auto WB shifts between frames; lock a preset or a custom reading for time-lapse, burst and video.
- RAW lets you change white balance later with no loss of quality, while JPEG bakes the colour in permanently.
Frequently asked questions
- Why are my indoor photos orange?
Because the camera is still set to a daylight or auto preset that assumes the light is neutral, while indoor bulbs are much warmer than that. Setting Tungsten or Incandescent, around 3200K, tells the camera the light is warm and makes it cool the image back to neutral. If the result is now too blue, the bulbs are closer to 4000K, so raise the value.
- Does white balance matter if I shoot RAW?
Not for the final result, because you can change it freely in editing without any loss. It still matters for the preview you compose on, for exposure judgement and for any JPEG or video files you create alongside the RAW. Many photographers set a fixed value rather than auto, so that the previews are consistent from frame to frame.
- What Kelvin is best for portraits?
Slightly warmer than neutral usually flatters skin, so somewhere around 5500-6000K outdoors in daylight, or a little above the neutral point for the lighting you are actually in. There is no single correct value, because the answer depends on the light and on the mood you want; the skill is in noticing when skin has turned grey or orange and correcting accordingly.
- How do I fix a green cast from foliage?
Set a custom white balance on a grey card in the same light, or shift the tint setting towards magenta. A green cast comes from light filtering through leaves and from reflections off grass, and it is strongest for subjects standing under trees. It is worth fixing in camera rather than later, because green skin tones are difficult to correct without affecting the rest of the picture.
