Light sources have different temperatures, whether warm or cool, and some can add unnatural-looking color casts to your photos. For example, have you ever taken a picture indoors under incandescent bulb lighting and noticed that the resulting photo had a yellowish cast? Or maybe you’ve taken a photo in the shade and the coloring came out much cooler than you expected.
Your DSLR has a variety of white balance settings that you can use to counteract these color casts and achieve color balance. Essentially, a white balance setting defines what the color white looks like in the given scene, which also affects the toning of all the hues in the scene.
With AWB, or automatic white balance, you allow your camera to evaluate the lighting and adjust the toning automatically. This auto mode works well most of the time, but for more creative control, I recommend making the white balance choices yourself.
If you shoot in RAW, you can change the white balance setting after you have taken the photograph by using editing software like Photoshop.
If you shoot in JPG format, you do not have the same option, but can achieve similar results with Photoshop by adding a warming or cooling filter. Go to Layer> New Adjustment Layer> Photo Filter.
If you use Photoshop through Adobe Creative Cloud, it has a new Camera RAW filter that will allow you to alter any file type, including making white balance adjustments.
This setting works best in outdoor, well-lit scenarios.
Shade adds a warmer cast to those shady, cool photos.
The Cloudy setting will add a warm tone—a bit less warm than Shade.
Tungsten counteracts the yellow cast of an incandescent bulb by adding a cool tone.
Fluorescent counteracts the greenish tones produced by this type of light.
This warms the icy cold blue from a flash.
Custom allows you to create your own customized white balance setting for a specific light source. Basically, you take a photo of a white object in the setting you will be shooting in. Follow the directions in your DSLR instruction manual for taking the data from this shot and importing it as a custom white balance setting.