In honor of St. Patty’s Day I thought I would talk about what’s going on with some photos I took yesterday. I definitely had a white balance issue with the green photo on the left. Digital cameras are great, however sometimes you’ll get some photos that come out very green, blue, and orange . This happens because digital camera’s  don’t always measure the light’s color temperature correctly. If you want to learn more about light temperature and digital photography check out Cambridge in Colour it’s a great website that can explain the physics behind it all.

Anyway, when you’re out taking progress photos pay attention to the display output. You’ll know immediately from the display image if you have a white balance issue. For many progress photos you can rely on the AWB “Auto White Balance” mode but if you’re taking a photos where you have a mixture of daylight and fluorescent lights you may need to force the white balance to daylight or fluorescent depending on the condition. This can be controlled through the camera’s “Menu”. You’ll want to select the “White Balance” option and then select the type of light that you think best matches your condition. It may take a couple tries but you’ll know when you’ve found the correct setting. Check your manual or go online if you’re having trouble finding the white balance setting, every camera is different. Hope this helps explain why sometimes your photos may be green, blue or orange.

Note:  If you have to take the camera off Auto White Balance (AWB) I suggest changing it back to “Auto” when you’re done. Otherwise someone else may grab the camera who’s not familiar with white balancing and take a bunch of blue photos then wonder what happened, trust me…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Tip Center. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.