They can mess with portrait skin tones, they can create muddy shadows and sickly highlights, and they can create unwanted moods in your photos.Īs I explain later in this article, you can use a color cast for creative effect – but it’s important that you do this carefully and deliberately, rather than as a failure to properly white balance a scene. This can also be an issue if you’re doing product photography or real-estate photography, where the goal is to portray the subject as true to life as possible. If you want to photograph a beautiful red sunset exactly as it appears to your eye, you’ll need to neutralize any color casts otherwise, your image won’t match the real-life conditions you experienced. Why is white balance important?Ĭolor casts cause a couple of problems in photography.įirst, they prevent you from capturing accurate, true colors in a scene. But you’ll get used to it over time (and it can help to think of the color temperatures as simply the opposite of what you’d expect). Yes, you read that right, and it can be confusing, especially if you’ve never encountered the color temperature scale before. And cooler color temperatures, produced by clouds or shade, have a high Kelvin value of 6000 K and beyond.Ĭooler light has a high Kelvin value? Warmer light has a low Kelvin value? Neutral color temperatures, such as midday sunlight, have a medium Kelvin value – around 5000 K.
Warmer color temperatures, such as those produced by a candle flame or a setting sun, have a low Kelvin value, such as 3000 K. Photographers refer to different color temperatures using the Kelvin scale. You’re correcting for a cast produced by the color temperature of the light, which lies along the blue-yellow spectrum. The bulk of white balancing in photography consists of color temperature correction. In general, natural light only requires correction along the blue-yellow spectrum, but certain types of artificial lighting may produce a noticeable color tint, in which case you’ll need to correct for that, too.