"Color Temperature", "Color Balance", "White Balance". People new to photography, digital or traditional, often have a difficult time visualizing what these terms refer to. And even those who are familiar with these terms may not have a clear picture of how they all work together. This lesson is designed to clarify these terms and to illustrate why and how to make adjustments to your White Balance in an indoor setting.

(Click on any image below for an enlarged view.)

COLOR TEMPERATURE
In basic terms, any light source (the sun, a light bulb) produces its own particular vibration, or frequency, to give it a certain Color Temperature. But since our eyes are so adaptable, the idea of Color Temperature can be somewhat confusing. Our eyes have the amazing ability to adjust the color of any particular light source, such that a white piece of paper illuminated by any single light source will automatically appear white. You can, however, notice obvious shifts in color when witnessing a scene lit with sources of varying Color Temperature, like yellow light emanating through the windows of a house contrasted against the blue light of dusk.

COLOR BALANCE
In a camera, Color Balance is achieved when an image is rendered close to how the eye perceives it. By setting the White Balance in your camera to match your light source, you can achieve "accurate" color, or Color Balance.

WHITE BALANCE
If you shoot with a film camera and want to achieve Color Balance in a daylight setting, you would use daylight film to match the Color Temperature of daylight. If you shoot with a film camera indoors with incandescent lighting, you would choose Tungsten film to balance the Color Temperature. If you are shooting digitally, however, achieving Color Balance in any lighting situation is just a matter of setting the White Balance in the camera.

To illustrate how the White Balance function works, we decided to shoot an indoor portrait using different Color Temperature settings. We first started by setting the White Balance to match the color temperature of the flash and activating the built-in flash of the camera.

The built-in flashes in Olympus cameras are balanced to the color temperature of daylight (5500 degrees Kelvin), which is represented as a sun icon in the White Balance preset menu. To select the Daylight/Flash preset, first press the OK/Menu button to pull up the Main menu and then press the Right arrow button to enter the CAMERA menu.

Figure 6 shows a typical result from this type of on-camera flash lighting. Since the light source is small and positioned just above the camera, the result is both flat in dimension and high in contrast. The reflections in the eyes are tiny- and a distracting shadow is rendered behind the model.

We decided to light the model using a soft box to achieve a more natural look. Using the same methods as in figures 6 & 7, we deactivated the flash, set up a Large Photoflex Starlite Kit and positioned it to the right of him at approximately a 45-degree angle.

Notice the difference in lighting! While the color temperature in Figure 11 has been neutralized, just as it was in Figure 6, the lighting looks much more natural. The soft box has diffused the light to render a soft, wrap-around light on the model's face, giving a window light effect.

The "correct" White Balance, however, may not always be the most preferable, and much of that depends on personal taste.

Notice how warm the shot is now. The White Balance setting is about 2300 degrees cooler than that of the Starlite, making the result very warm. And although Color Temperature in this image is not rendered "correctly", it does give the shot a different mood. In fact, this image ended up being one of the model's favorites.

As was demonstrated here, it is important to know how to adjust the White Balance of a digital camera to render accurate color as well as to create special effects.