White Balance

White Balance
What is White Balance?

The white balance can have a real impact upon the shots you take. The reason to adjust white balance is to get the colours in the shot as natural as possible. without adjusting the white balance shots can come out with an orange, blue, yellow etc tinge to them. this is because images with different sources of light have a different colour of temperature to them.




White Balance is measured by the Kelvin Scale. This is a scale that measures the temperature of light and provides a numerical value for each colour. Shorter wavelengths have a lower temperature and longer wavelengths have a higher temperature.

Tungsten lighting, sometimes referred to as 'hot lights' because they emit heat, are skewed to the lower end of the light spectrum, hence the look warmer or more reddish/yellow without proper filtering. one major problem to tungsten is that they are not reliable over a period of time as their colour will change as they age (variations in voltage will also change the colour output).

Florescent lighting is skewed towards the blue end of the spectrum, so again without proper filtering, you end up will a cool or blue/green colour cast to images or footage. however they are not as hot as tungsten lights, so are safer to work with.

Tungsten                                     Florescent