Photography Lesson: White Balancing Ambient Light Photos

Unbalanced Lighting Vs. Balanced Lighting

Have you ever taken a photo with a digital camera without a flash and found the color of the image to be way off?

Sometimes the light creates a color cast that is too orange or perhaps too green or too blue. This is because the color temperature of each light source is different.

If you take a photo without a flash and your main lights in the room are from standard incandescent light bulbs, the photo could look all orange. If you adjust for the incandenscent lights and outside sun light comes in from a window, that light can look blue. And, if you take a photo where there are flourescent light fixtures, those photos may look green.

So how to you adjust for this?

One of the easiest way is to color correct your images in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom. By using a simple gray card or white card, you can adjust the color balance so that the images will look correct.

The two photos above show the use of a device called the WhiBal. With this gray/white/black card, you can quickly color-correct any image using Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom. A simple click on the card and the image will be color corrected. And, you can apply this corrected information to any other image shot under the same lighting condtions within that room.

What you do is take one shot with the WhilBal held out in front of you. By referencing all images taken with the same lighting conditions in the same room, you can make all images match the same reference standard.

There are other ways to color balance an image, but this is one of the fastest ways to do it. The WhiBal card shown above is one of their older models. Current WhiBal cards use a single card rather than three. But the concept of how to correct the color-shift is the same.

Is it worth the effort to do this? I think it is.