When I shot film, before the digital revolution, I would pick my film stock with a specific intention … based on the lighting conditions I was expecting. But once I started shooting digital, first with Canon, and then later with Fujifilm, I just set my WB to auto. It was a case of “set it, and forget it.” But honestly, why in the world would I leave it up to the camera (today), when in the past I always seriously considered it. Thanks for resetting my perspective. Well done!
I'm with you, Brent! Back in the film era I paid a lot of attention to color temperature. Camera auto white balance was a big change. Another big change is that so much of lighting has transitioned from 3200K tungsten to 5500K daylight LED. In the past, I had to gel windows so the daylight coming in would match the hot, tungsten lights (or vice versa), but now it's often the case that everything is daylight balanced. I do still gel windows with ND so they aren't blown out vis-a-vis the interior lighting, but I don't typically color balance these days. Anyway, like you, I sort of forgot about color temperature in the transition. Sean's video is a simple but bold wake-up call that we should be paying more attention to! As he describes, there are times when we don't want White Balance set at 5500K, like a white wedding dress. Also, with sports, I think a blue overcast day, or an orange tungsten gym, or a green-cast gym, in all those cases, I'd prefer a neutral color balance. But, exactly as he describes, for street, photojournalism, documentary, and other scenarios, it makes total sense to let the images reflect the color of the light as experienced, not wiped out by auto white. How did I not think of this before!???
@@Millie-um2bi Not even sometimes. On a sunny day, depending on if you are pointing at a sunny area or a shady area, or depending on your subject, you can watch WB shift dramatically as you pan. Recently I had my camera pointed towards a cut tree branch, some of the leaves had begun to turn brown. Depending on if I was focused on the green grass in the background or the brown leaves in the foreground (Both in sunny conditions), WB shifted from 6500 to 3500
It’s crazy, I’ve been shooting for 14 years. I’ve watched hundreds of RUclips videos on photography, and this is the first time I completely understood HOW white balance works. Don’t get me wrong I’ve used white balance expertly over the years to correct colors and also creatively, but that white paper with the color slider made it finally click for me. Props on the teaching skills! I appreciate it, thank you!
After watching this video, I realized I've never fully understood white balance in digital photography. This made all the pieces I've tried to learn come together for me. Thank you for being the incredible communicator you are, Sean!
Old guy here and I use white balance creatively. Just used, what pleases the image. But I never got the “how stuff works” part, which left me always wanting to “really understand”. That strip thingy did it for me, brilliant ! 😀
Sean I've been doing this too! It's good to see others use WB this way. After starting photography and learning about WB I pretty quickly discovered that id shooting in uncompressed RAW I could just leave it in one spot and that the in-camera WB doesn't change the data collected, it just embeds a WB setting that your editing software will pickup and set the settings to automatically. You can get the exact same result if you set it in post as you can if you set it in camera! Once I learnt this I decided to leave it at 5500k for the sake of consistency. Always having the same starting WB has given me a consistent reference to understand what temperature light sources are and how my camera sees them. It's allowed me to become aware of how my brain compensates for WB changes when I'm just looking at the world and has trained me to understand temperatures of light sources so much better than I would have if I set WB in camera! I would encourage others to try this way of doing WB too, even if it's only for a couple months as a learning experience.
An alternative, of course, is to leave the camera on auto WB and instead have Lightroom apply a specific temperature when importing. Then the images will look the same after imported, "be consistent", but you still have the camera's auto values stored in the RAW and can be used if needed. Note also, that WB is not stored in the RAW as a Kelvin number. That is why the kelvin-setting in the camera will not yield the similar number showing in Lightroom.
I want to counter this concept by explaining how white balance works when shooting in RAW. When you shoot in RAW with AWB enabled, the in-camera white balance temperature (as well as the calculated tint shift value) are stored inside the RAW file as METADATA. The individual pixel data is not modified by the white balance before being written into the RAW file. This means that, no matter what white balance value you set in-camera, when shooting RAW the pixel data will be EXACTLY THE SAME. Now, the downside of setting a specific white balance value is that only your custom white balance value will be stored in the metadata of your RAW files. This means that you are LOSING an important reference value (two, actually, when you consider the tint shift) that you might later want to either use or at least reference when editing your photos. So, if you shoot with AWB on in RAW format, not only do you preserve the camera’s in-moment interpretation of the light (WB and Tint), but you can modify the white balance to literally ANY value in post, and the result would be exactly the same as having shot in RAW with the same white balance value explicitly set. TL;DR you lose nothing shooting RAW with AWB, but you lose useful reference values when shooting RAW with a specific white balance specified! Finally, remember that you can always batch-set your WB to 5500 when importing your photos into your processing software of choice! You don’t have just a “broad range of flexibility” when changing the white balance on a RAW… You have TOTAL flexibility! Additional: It IS a great idea to batch-set your RAW photos on import into your editing software to a WB of 5500K. You still preserve the metadata value for AWB and tint shift in the RAW (and you can compare the calculated with 5500K if you want to, as well). I just strongly disagree that you should explicitly set your camera to shoot everything at 5500K. Sorry, but that is wholly unnecessary and you're sacrificing genuinely-important in-moment calculated information that absolutely can make a huge difference in post. To give you an example: when shooting in an environment with multiple light sources with different colour temps, it's extremely useful to know what bias and/or balance your camera calculated for that shot so that you can calculate your own WB when post-processing the image (or even do masked WB adjustments to different parts of an image depending on the calculated colour tone of that light source)
And this video shows us how people desperately and blindly look for some sort of magic tricks from their favorite creators. Thanks a lot for your comment I thought whole wb range is saved in raw no matter what settings
You’re totally correct. That said, for my workflow I have no interest in what the camera AWB value would be (what you refer to as a reference value). It more important for me to have a consistent value from shot to shot as I take many frames of a subject over a period of time. So I set it to 5500k and forget it until I adjust in post. Yes your suggestion to import at 5500k accomplishes the same thing but I prefer a ‘one less thing to think about in cam’ approach. Horses for courses. Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
Yes, but if your are gonna do hundreds of shots under the same conditions, it can save you a lot of editing time if you set the WB on camera, even if you can bulk edit.
@@danielsantisteban How exactly does it save time? You simply apply the 5500K white balance setting at the point of importing the RAW images into your editing application of choice. It adds no time at all to do this (especially if you set it as your default)
I have never thought of white balance this way before. Thanks for the clear explanation and offering this as food for thought. I think I'll give it a try!
In 38 years as a full time pro, I don' think I have ever used Auto White balance. I work in exactly the same way you do, I leave it set to 5600K. The only time I change it is if I have a colour critical job that needs to render truly accurate colours. In that case I use an X-Rite Colour Checker to create custom colour profiles. I've nothing against using auto, its just not what I do. I worked with film for so long, when I changed to digital white balance wasn't really something I thought about. I just used the camera as if it were loaded with daylight balanced film. Great video Sean, I wish more people created content like yours, Thank you.
Maybe its the fact you learned to shoot with daylight balanced film so it just became natural. I leave it in auto, and make camera white balance shift slightly turned to amber. Honestly canon auto wb works good for me, but I want to start shooting at manual because it gives richer colors when set correctly. I will try to keep it at 5500 for street photography, and try to implement that knowledge in my portrait and car shots
We were so happy to have the WB auto correction that we forgot that a white paper under a lamp should be orange 😅 Thanks for the reminder, great video as always! 👍 I'll definitely experiment more with the WB settings
There is no such thing as correct white balance, you may want a picture look one way or another. You may want to make a sunset very warm, for example. You may want to make a portrait look warmer, because it's more pleasant. That's why there are many presets to change the mood. It also isn't true that WB at 5500K would make the image look like what the eye sees in the same situation, not even close. In fact, setting the image to the correct temperature would look close to what the eye sees. Don't confuse it with calibration by using the gray card.
This is an absolute lightbulb (tungsten?!) moment. I've never seen anyone explain their thought process like this and it's going to be my approach from now on. Thank you
This video finally helped me understand why I was going insane trying to figure out why I wasn't able to get my camera to capture the colors I was seeing when photographing a night scene that had both warm and cool lighting.
You vastly underestimate how much our eyes adjust to light temperature, the pictures with AWB are closer to the scene when you saw it in person, not after the fact when viewing on a monitor with a different light temperature around. Where I live sandstorms are a frequent occurrence, and going from the sepia-like outside to inside with a white or cool lighting makes interiors look freezing cold blue. White LEDs turn into blue neon, after a few minutes your eyes adjust and it's white again.
our minds actually fill in missing details. If we go into a scene that is lit up by tungsten, our eyes may adjust white balance slightly but its our minds that will make more sense of what the actuality might be. It really depends how familiar you are of that scene in different lights as to how you perceive it. That few minute adjustment you speak of is not a mechanism of the eyes but your brain making that adjustment. You could argue that the cold blue when you come back inside is the 'real' colour. Your eyes merely receive the information for our brains to process. It would be an interesting experiment to get people to reproduce colours of objects within an unfamiliar scene that is lit up by different kelvins of light to see how they are remembered.
@@livinagoodlife true that it's the brain doing the correction, as eyes are just receptors. But I find it hard to argue that the blue tone is the ground truth, because it's the result of being outside where everything is orange (think Breaking Bad Mexico filter, but even more intense), so your vision cools things down a lot. This results in a blue tone when going inside where there is "white" lighting because everything is blue-shifted.
@@livinagoodlife I only partly agree. One would need to read a paper on this, but here is what I personally observed and what you can try for yourself: Go outside on a sunny day, and let the sun shine directly into your face, but close your eyes. Instead of darkness, you will see red because the sun shines through the red blood in your eyelids. Stay like this for roughly two minutes. Then look away and open your eyes. You will be outside in a very familiar scene, but everything will look extremely cool, like you sucked the red color out of everything. This works by the same principle as when your eyes adjust to darkness, however just with one color. Of course this is a very extreme example, but by the same principle your eyes will adjust to every lighting condition if it is consistant enough, for example in a sandstorm like has been mentioned before, or if you stay in a room exclusively lit by tungsten light. And that has nothing to do with the brain. I do still think tho, that the brain plays a very significant role in the whole thing, but it's definitely not only the brain.
What you are both saying is valid but also fully subjective. None of it matters other than in theory as long as its a single image. As soon as its a series or even film with various scenes, for the sake of consistency in editing, color balance and aperture is everything. Only proper way is a colour chart as reference and color correction. But that is a step more complex than just white balance. In the end, if post editing is part of the workflow, AWB vs set value doesn't matter. Just two types of workflow. If the in-camera original is the end result then it highly matters.
One month later since changing this setting I think the quality of my work is better. Best advice I’ve gotten in a while. Thanks Sean for publishing this piece.
I’ve been shooting with digital cameras for 20 years now and have always used Auto White Balance, assuming I could just make changes in post. Thank you for giving me another way to think about this. I will give it a try for a while. Thanks, Sean, for making the most thoughtful videos out there.
The changes in post are much easier when all your photos start from a consistent point. After shooting in one WB setting for a while you begin to understand much better what changes you can make in post! I love it
@@Millie-um2bi "The changes in post are much easier when all your photos start from a consistent point." I don't think this argument holds water. That's assuming you are shooting in consistent lighting. If not, this is not relevant. And even if it is, it's still something you can just sync across the entire series of shots. If you're in the same spot with same lighting, nothing prevents you from correcting a shot and later syncing that to the exact same value to other shots, and that works regardless if all shots are shot the same or each shot is completely different. Makes no practical difference. Starting from a consistent point in varying light though only means that you are sometimes going to tweak by a lot and sometimes by a little, I don't see how this makes anything easier.
I'm doing photography for like 8 years now. Needless to say, you converted me to 5500k. I always shot on auto white balance. Those days are now behind me. Thank you very much!
Thanks for sharing this, Sean! I've never considered fixing my white balance this way, but it makes so much sense to do so for street photography. The joy of getting things to look closer to what the eye sees would help me be more happy with what I shoot, and potentially have less edits to make to photos. Thank you so much for sharing your process. Such an eye opener!
I’ve always set my camera on ‘daylight’ just because I was too lazy to always adjust my settings. And didn’t want auto because I never want my camera to make my decisions. Being a landscape / nature photographer, it seems to work out well for me. Thanks for explaining it!!
Thank you a lot, this has been probably the best explanation of what balance is and how it works in camera and, most importantly, the different scenarios and the effect of choosing one setting vs the other. Greatly appreciated.
What I love about out you Sean, is that you are always in service to others. I hope you know just how much you are appreciated. This is the first time I’ve had the concept and use of white balance explained in this way and it makes so much sense. Keep doing what you’re doing! Parable Volume 3 is on its way to me and I’m anxious to see what you’ve been up to.
This video has forever changed the way I take photos. Thank you for making it. Your work continues to inspire me on my path to making this my full time profession. Thank you!
My understanding of white balance was poorly lacking, but I did not know why, until now. Your video is a great example of taking an idea that appeared on the periphery (conversation with a friend) and making it into something that will resonate with many people. That is the art of it.
Sean, you have no idea how much you've helped me with this video. As an amateur photographer, I've always struggled to grasp the concept of white balance, to the point where I just left it on auto mode. Your explanation completely blew my mind, it was incredibly clear and accompanied by simple examples. Thank you SO much for that!
I've used this method for several years now in my creative work. It's incredibly practical for multiple reasons. Love your explanations and your teaching method. Thanks for creating so much awesome content over all these years!
After 50 years of photography, hobby only, I realized the deep truth of how we see and yes, film was as it was. Digital wants to make it better, what is already perfect. Thank you.
Film cameras could not accurately depict what the human eye can see. Digital cameras are not yet able to, but they’re getting closer. Film was not “perfect” in the sense of color accuracy.
Film was terrible, use the wrong WB film and your images look bad. Most people were simply buying film rated for daylight and ended up with awful pictures indoors, at sunsets, etc. And even in daylight, the WB of the scenes changes and can result in very warm or very cold colors. It's rare when 5500K is the best match for the scene.
Our job as photogs is to create, either in our style or the style desired by the client. For me, the bottom line is WB can be adjusted in post so I don't get too worried about setting in camera, except when I need to represent the actual color as it was during the shoot. So, like Sean, I prefer to stick with the basic 5500K unless there is a need for a specific setting. Love this channel, always a fair, balanced and thoughtful approach to our craft... and Sean just seems like a darn decent human being!
Of course, we all change WB in post when it's desirable. That's not the question. The question is how many pictures you would need to correct in post. When shooting with AWB (which is pretty good even in Sony cameras) you may end up with a few pictures needing correction. When you set it to 5500K you will have hundreds of pictures needing correction.
Good to know I'm not alone with this idea. I do the same and very rarely change the WB in my postprocessing work. I appreciate your time and effort making this for us.
"But raw files have a ton of latitude" - Not super important here, but WB settings or auto-WB do not affect the raw file at all, data captured is the same regardless. It will affect what is loaded into your processing application though.
I just wrote basically the same comment. The latitude part refers to exposure, but WB changes have zero effect on the quality of the file. It's not baking in.
Simply love your videos. My favorite is still "Protect your Highlights: A lesson for Light and Life" but truly appreciate all of them and the often extra dimension you apply. Being thoughtful.
Not surprisingly as I'm merely an amateur and Sean is one the best there is, I completely subscribe to what he says around minute 9. Perfect white balance robs ambiance but strictly staying at 5500K tends to exaggerate colour-casts the moment the lighting strays in either direction. Now obviously its a matter of personal preference if you want to keep it like that but I too tend to pull back a bit in post or if I remember, in camera. One thing, Sean says RAW has a ton of latitude. He's oversimplifying for our benefit. RAW doesn't actually give a hoot about your white balance setting, that is applied afterwards during RAW conversion so you can put it anywhere you like and it shouldn't affect image quality in the slightest. A bit more information that might interest some - First, daylight temperature depends greatly on where you are shooting. Generally the farther from the equator the further light from the sun has to travel through our atmosphere and this tends to absorb blue light, resulting in natural light at midday that is quite warm. Thus daylight in (say) Birmingham is a good deal warmer in tone that it is in Chennai (latitudes 52 north and 13 north respectively). The midpoint daylight setting in Chennai is not 5500K but 6400K. Shall I ramble on? This at first seems counterintuitive: why is the light in the tropics cool and in the arctic warm? Well perhaps simply because there were misnamed. A blue flame is hotter than a red-orange flame so whilst, if applied correctly, blues should have been called hot and reds cool, it turns out our brains start to break at that point. Because since we lived in caves we've associated a flickering orange fire with warmth and many a proto-human has probably singed his fur on a glowing red ember. Secondly, the interesting bit about daylight colour temperature is the effect it has on human culture. Because blue light is kind of cold and desaturating, can even look slightly metallic, tropical cultures love bright and saturated colours. You see it in the clothes, in the art and in the architectural decoration. And some may notice that the the same pink, green, turquoise and gold saree that looks quite opulent in Colombo looks frankly a bit garish when worn in New York, whilst tourists fresh off the plane from Malmo landing in Bangkok look somewhat wan and anaemic until they start to develop a bit of a tan. Sorry for going on for so long. Colour fascinates me. :) Edit: Just a footnote - I forgot to mention however that I slightly disagree with the bit around minute 12, that our eyes are daylight white balanced. First - daylight where? If I live all my life in Lagos (latitude 6N) it would be quite a handicap to have my eyes biologically set to 5500K. Secondly, most computers and phones you may have noticed have a night light setting to ease eye strain. This is because if you are in a tungsten lit room and someone hands you a sheet of white paper - you see a sheet of white paper. You do not see a sheet of orange paper, your brain (not your eyes) has already made the adjustment for you*. So here's a tip to help those of you who work late at your computers and suffer from eye strain. Hold a white piece of paper next to your monitor and then lower the temperature on your monitor until the screen and the paper look about the same. Second tip, reduce the brightness until that looks about the same too. Your eyes will thank you and as long as you are not doing colour critical work* you will soon forget that you have the night light setting on. *however if they actually handed you a sheet of orange paper your brain might still see it as white. Because it matches the colour of the light, that's the point at which our brain can get fooled. For colour critical work therefore you need balanced lighting or if you know the lighting that will be used by your viewers you should work in similar light. Maybach and Lexus for example have light booths in their main showrooms where they can park the car and change the ambient light to match the light where you live. This way you can see what it will look like when you get it home.
I think if you shoot into the sun with auto white balance at Afternoon when the sun is exactly in the middle of the sky, you would probably get a more accurate number. for me its around 5100k which doesnt make sense but alright
Was out shooting yesterday and spent a good 2 hours searching for a proper white balance because I felt the auto settings were hindering my creativity, then you drop this video a day later. Right on time.
@@markankone9362 why not just put the camera in auto and fix it in Lightroom or photoshop in a second. Story and composition and character are surely what is important.
@@LASHMAR I suppose a better word is "experimenting" for a proper white balance? Yesterday I shot throughout the day in NYC, experimenting "in search of a proper white balance" of my liking, however, I came away undecided still due to my lacking a firm understanding of white balance.
As a begginer I have a feeling that this is one of the most important videos I watched, because I feel like I have an ok grasp of iso, aperture and shutter speed and how they affects exposure, as well as how depth of field more or less works, but I never understood what this white balance concept is until now. All I knew is the numbers refer to this yellow tint or blue tint or whatever but didn't know what the setting in the camera did so I always put it on auto or set it to tungsten in warm light or daylight in actual daylight and so on, and indeed I could never get a pictured that looked like what my eyes were seeing in a bar! I didn't know why until now, thank you so much, this was enlightening.
I leave it parked at 5200K, and shoot RAW so I can non-destructively change the white balance afterwards. You are losing NOTHING by changing RAW images afterwards, the in-camera settings are all just a viewing filter AFTER the data. This includes saturation, contrast, and sharpening. I actually leave those settings at weak levels (-4) in camera so that I deliberately choose their values later. However, in the case of white balance if I am indoors for a length of time I will adjust the white balance in camera because the images on the camera look even more yellow than real life. Matching your viewfinder or screen to real life can be a good technique. For video it is more important to get the white balance right, because it IS baked into the file (except for RAW video), and while you can change it that process is destructive (but you probably won't notice).
The thing here, WB is very different if you shoot RAW and JPEG. It even applies differently in Lightroom depending on the file. If you shoot RAW it doesn’t matter what camera setting you have, you can edit it at pleasure.
5500k is as good a starting place as any for a raw file. if anything this technique might give you a better starting place as a "default" for what the scene looked like. but how it looked to your eyes at the time and how it should look in the finished photo aren't necessarily the same!
You're absolutely right, and he says the same thing by the end of the video; he just feels it's a better starting point for the tweaks you might want to make. For me it makes much sense, since it also tends to save me time at the computer. Of course not always what I saw at the moment of the shooting is the final image I want, but mostly I prefer to be faithful to the reality I perceived then.
I've watched many white balance videos over the last few days, this is the only one I needed. You have a brilliant way of explaining things, thanks Sean.
I’ve been working in broadcast TV for a number of years and this is how we shoot - WB is set to 5600 and left, so they have the latitude in the edit but mostly because they want the scene to look how it was, especially in factual entertainment where it needs to appear as it was at the time. Good video though and a supporter of the theory here 🤙
Excellent advice. This is probably an area that many people never think about. Color balance can make an amazing difference in the look of your image. Thank you.
Thanks Sean, you’ve put into words an internal struggle I’ve often had setting a custom white balance on my camera by “correcting” the white balance of a sheet of paper or a white ceiling. I’m an amateur and have bought into the mantra that white must always look white, which in my heart I knew was wrong but never before realised why. Thank you.
No, you're approach isn't odd. A lot of us that started back in the film days shoot this way. There's nothing funnier than watching some young guy drag himself out of bed at stupid o'clock to photograph a sunrise, and end up with bland grey light, because they're wedded to auto-white balance. More than half of natural light photography is about capturing colour casts, and a good slice of strobe photography is about simulating them, and nothing kills it so well as auto white balance.
Auto WB doesn't kill anything, what kills is that people are adamant about keeping the white point exactly neutral. Which makes for "accurate" but boring images. Shooting with Auto WB doesn't prevent anyone from changing the value later, it's also worth noting that most new cameras actually have 2 different AutoWB modes where one intends to keep things as neutral as possible and the other intends to keep the ambiance of the shot intact. If it's warm, it leaves it warm, if it's cool, it will leave it as such. This works very well and it is a big difference between the 2 modes.
The best instruction I have ever received on RUclips! I learn so much on this platform, but this is totally next level. I just ordered your digital library complete. Thank you so much!
This is a crazy game changer. Switched off auto white balance and my shots look so much better. Living the way night photography comes out. Can really see the difference in the kinds of streetlights
This information has been one of the best I've got about settings of my cameras. I really appreciate it, because 5500K has solved so much of my struggles with WB. Thank you so much.
This is the absolute best white balance video I’ve come across. You sir are a master teacher. The simplification of a seemingly complex topic? Wow. Thank you. And your work is an inspiration 💗
Sean has mastered the art of teaching as well as he's mastered the art of shooting. Always an informative pleasure listening to his well thought out explanations. I learn something every time.
Dear Sean, thank you so much for this. I just cannot believe the difference this setting has made. For anyone like me who struggled to get better ‘results’ with their camera than ‘everyone’ was getting with a phone…well this is for them! Suddenly I am on to a whole new thing… THANKYOOOO 👍
Thank you for challenging photographers to think and decide for themselves. I recently went through this exact thought process, and I too found myself locking my camera on a daylight white balance. Thanks again for your thought provoking approach.
I always come back to this video. It is brilliant. Just got a new Panasonic GX85 w/ a Leica/Panasonic 15mm (30 equivalent) lens. I decided on 5600k white balance. Thank you as always! Brilliant videos.
I do something similar for the same reasons. I prefer things to look as I see them rather than to be color correct which most of the time is boring. But I just set it to daylight instead of kelvin which is almost the same. Great video!
Sean, tomorrow I am heading out the door with my white balance set on daylight. Yes, there have been moments in the past where I came home with some very strange colors. Never quite understood why. And tomorrow as day turns to night, I am leaving the daylight settings and will be watching for what happens. Thanks for this. By the way, I have been listening to your lectures for quite a long time. I have learned so much from you, not the least of which is to pay more attention to what effect I want than what others are speaking about what they want. Freedom. You are about freedom.
I was actually thinking these days about the white balance of film photography, and questioning why not do the same with my digital camera and set it to daylight always. Awesome, this video gave me the answer to that question. Thank you Sean.
Brilliant! I'm what many would call a 'lazy photographer'........I have no form of qualification, and I've never cared for 'bogging' myself down with settings too much. My interests lie in capturing a moment, or a scene first and foremost, and so that often means that I simply favour shooting in auto. That being said, I've never fully understood white balance if truth be told, and this video has opened my eyes and given me something to think about. Expertly, visually demonstrated in an easy way to understand, and something I am definitely going to think about moving forward when I'm shooting. Thanks Sean!
Great introduction to the concept. One of the clearest I've seen I reckon. I just want to mention (if anyone sees this!) that the actual data in a RAW file is completely unaffected by the white balance set in camera - that's only a bit of metadata. So you're really not loosing anything, from a technical perspective, by changing it in post. Video is different though.
I love this approach that you take with white balance. I have been just setting the Kelvin to what I see as “real life” but in daylight viewing. Your way of taking photos strictly at 5500 Kelvin is something I will have to use. Not to set and forget, but be more present while shooting and tweak afterwards. Thank you Sean for your quality videos you make. You’re always an inspirational and thought provoking teacher. Keep up the great work!
As a beginner amateur photographer that barley knows how to shot manual. This makes absolutely freaking sense to me. I sometimes wonder why my pictures do not look like the scene I have. This is a trick I'll incorporate into my arsenal. Thank you.
Thank you for this valuable information. Never thought of white balance as you presented. As one who struggles with the "correct" white balance i want my images to match what I actually saw when i created them. This is inspiring.
As a wedding photographer, I subscribed when you said wedding photographers may not have time to fiddle with settings. I’ve shot a thousand+ weddings, and white balance isn’t something I need to get perfect on the day of, but it is something that constantly occupies 10% of my brainpower. Sometimes setting WB to auto allows me to put 100% of my creative energy into posing, composition, finding the perfect moment. It’s a RAW file anyway, and our editors will ALWAYS edit for proper skin tones. Great video!
Thank you for this tip, it has been a life saver. I’ve always struggled to get my pictures to look as my eyes see the scene since moving to Sony and this has fixed 90% of the problem. Everything looks more realistic and as intended.
Thanks Sean another really clear and pragmatic explanation that I will be able to use to reduce the need to put the perceived colour back in to get the atmosphere back in.
Absolutely the greatest explanation on WB I have ever heard and seen that has cleared this mystery up for me! It's always the simple things that bite the hardest Then when you hear and see the clarity, you wonder how you could not see it for yourself! It's because I've never seen it explained like this before! Thank you Sean! You have an amazing gift for teaching! Thanks for sharing!
Master of explanation. A great teacher….if anybody asked for an explanation of something, I’d direct them to your channel. I can see many photographers setting their WB to 5500k now from Auto, including myself! And for me, rightly so.
First time viewer Sean, probably the best WB explanation. I was trying to reset my WB for an outing yesterday, but now have reset both of my cameras to 5500 & will give it a try.
A tightly edited and thought-provoking video. This, and your last episode about Phil Sharp, are some of the most useful video’s I’ve seen in recent months. All the best.
Hi Sean I learn so much from you when you deliver training through videos shot like this. I was new to photography 6 years ago and after watching your explanation on how to shoot manual I now shoot like that 80% of the time. You explain your message in simple ways using simple props and it is simply brilliant. I've missed this sort of educational video format since you left London. Thank you for making another one. Looking forward to many more. Andy
I'm a glad people are thinking more about how the camera interprets colors in their images! I would be careful with using white balance as a creative control though. White balance is used to control the center of the colors captured by the camera for all other color controls (e.g. saturation, hue, etc.). Definitely change the colors in your images in creative ways that depart from reality, just be careful with which controls you are using (and understand the impacts between the sliders)!
Small tip: most sensors today are daylight balanced to 5000k meaning they dont pull or push gain in red and blue channels and match our perception the best. 5600k is too cold and is more like flash and not real daylight. So try setting the white balance to 5000 and forget it. You'll be blown away by the consistency
Thanks Sean for opening my eyes to white balance. It makes total sense to what your saying. I've been doing photography for over 40 years and never really put much thought into it after things went digital. Thanks again.
This how things worked in the film days. If you shot Kodachome your WB was fixed at 5600k. In the digital age, I don't worry about it because I shoot RAW and it doesn't matter what the camera does. Setting WB to auto (shooting RAW) does nothing more than set your sliders in your posr-processing software. You can always change them in post with no consequences (and you probably) should.
I frequently set the white balance at the beginning of the day and then ‘fire and forget’ until I’m in Lightroom. This excellent video has given me a better understanding, I’m going to try Sean’s 5560k start point. Great job Sean explaining, informing and inspiring!
I saw this yesterday and went out for a quick shoot last night. I’m very thankful because I like seeing the bright colors that the daylight wb brought. More experimentation is due. Thanks and God bless you.
THANK YOU for explaining white balance VISUALLY for us visual learners!! I had a sneaking suspicion about what white balance was in adobe lightroom but didn’t know the mechanics behind it or how to manipulate it real time (not post production)
I've been a photographer for about 50 years and I understand white balance but I thought about it the same like you do. To me this is thinking out of box. Brilliant. Thanks a lot for sharing. One can always skin a cat in more then one way. Please keep on sharing your thoughts even if you think they are crazy. Some people might like them.
Love the demonstration with the water color bar across the temperature range. I usually left WB alone, or set it to a specific K value to generate a specific look. This feels like it opens up options to not only capture things as I see them, but provide an extra way to give a feeling to the images I create.
Hello Sean, I wanted to say thank you. I've been photographing for 6 years now, and I've always struggled with it constantly rushing for the 'best photo' or 'perfect composition,' and so on. Not long ago, I discovered that I have complete multisensory aphantasia, and it was incredibly discouraging. I thought I would never be able to become an artist that I could be proud of. Your videos and your approach have helped me a lot. I don't know if you will read this message, but I wanted you to know how grateful I am. 😊
![ARGENTINA vs. PERÚ [1-0] | RESUMEN | ELIMINATORIAS SUDAMERICANAS | FECHA 12](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/xtI25ENDDSY/mqdefault.jpg)
When I shot film, before the digital revolution, I would pick my film stock with a specific intention … based on the lighting conditions I was expecting. But once I started shooting digital, first with Canon, and then later with Fujifilm, I just set my WB to auto. It was a case of “set it, and forget it.” But honestly, why in the world would I leave it up to the camera (today), when in the past I always seriously considered it. Thanks for resetting my perspective. Well done!
Auto WB will also sometimes make different decisions during the course of a shoot which makes editing a batch of photos consistently so much harder!
I'm with you, Brent! Back in the film era I paid a lot of attention to color temperature. Camera auto white balance was a big change. Another big change is that so much of lighting has transitioned from 3200K tungsten to 5500K daylight LED. In the past, I had to gel windows so the daylight coming in would match the hot, tungsten lights (or vice versa), but now it's often the case that everything is daylight balanced. I do still gel windows with ND so they aren't blown out vis-a-vis the interior lighting, but I don't typically color balance these days. Anyway, like you, I sort of forgot about color temperature in the transition. Sean's video is a simple but bold wake-up call that we should be paying more attention to! As he describes, there are times when we don't want White Balance set at 5500K, like a white wedding dress. Also, with sports, I think a blue overcast day, or an orange tungsten gym, or a green-cast gym, in all those cases, I'd prefer a neutral color balance. But, exactly as he describes, for street, photojournalism, documentary, and other scenarios, it makes total sense to let the images reflect the color of the light as experienced, not wiped out by auto white. How did I not think of this before!???
@@Millie-um2bi Not even sometimes. On a sunny day, depending on if you are pointing at a sunny area or a shady area, or depending on your subject, you can watch WB shift dramatically as you pan. Recently I had my camera pointed towards a cut tree branch, some of the leaves had begun to turn brown. Depending on if I was focused on the green grass in the background or the brown leaves in the foreground (Both in sunny conditions), WB shifted from 6500 to 3500
@@ReclusiveEagle yeah see that's why I turned that shit off so fast hahaha
I just adjust it in post. I don’t worry about how it looks in the camera.
It’s crazy, I’ve been shooting for 14 years. I’ve watched hundreds of RUclips videos on photography, and this is the first time I completely understood HOW white balance works. Don’t get me wrong I’ve used white balance expertly over the years to correct colors and also creatively, but that white paper with the color slider made it finally click for me. Props on the teaching skills! I appreciate it, thank you!
I know!
This!
@@freekvanootegem7462 that
@@Bledder typical photographer always putting down another photographer. This is why we can’t have community.
@@Bledder how's the weather up there on that high horse? The information in this video is demonstrably NOT common sense. Get over yourself.
The quality of both explanations and simultaneously showing examples 🔥
After watching this video, I realized I've never fully understood white balance in digital photography. This made all the pieces I've tried to learn come together for me. Thank you for being the incredible communicator you are, Sean!
Old guy here and I use white balance creatively. Just used, what pleases the image. But I never got the “how stuff works” part, which left me always wanting to “really understand”. That strip thingy did it for me, brilliant ! 😀
Sean I've been doing this too! It's good to see others use WB this way.
After starting photography and learning about WB I pretty quickly discovered that id shooting in uncompressed RAW I could just leave it in one spot and that the in-camera WB doesn't change the data collected, it just embeds a WB setting that your editing software will pickup and set the settings to automatically. You can get the exact same result if you set it in post as you can if you set it in camera!
Once I learnt this I decided to leave it at 5500k for the sake of consistency. Always having the same starting WB has given me a consistent reference to understand what temperature light sources are and how my camera sees them. It's allowed me to become aware of how my brain compensates for WB changes when I'm just looking at the world and has trained me to understand temperatures of light sources so much better than I would have if I set WB in camera!
I would encourage others to try this way of doing WB too, even if it's only for a couple months as a learning experience.
An alternative, of course, is to leave the camera on auto WB and instead have Lightroom apply a specific temperature when importing. Then the images will look the same after imported, "be consistent", but you still have the camera's auto values stored in the RAW and can be used if needed.
Note also, that WB is not stored in the RAW as a Kelvin number. That is why the kelvin-setting in the camera will not yield the similar number showing in Lightroom.
@@realthoprivate also a good option yes!
@@realthoprivate So would you me matching the temperature in lightroom by yourself while editing?
I really love it when Sean drops a new video. It’s just a bright spot in my week.
Bruh, you need to get out more. Don't get me wrong, Tucker's vids are great...but a bright spot?
@@Daniel_Zalman maybe keep your opinions to yourself? 🤷🏼♂️
Thanks mate.
@@StoicJason Occasionally.
…but is it a 5500K bright spot?
I want to counter this concept by explaining how white balance works when shooting in RAW.
When you shoot in RAW with AWB enabled, the in-camera white balance temperature (as well as the calculated tint shift value) are stored inside the RAW file as METADATA.
The individual pixel data is not modified by the white balance before being written into the RAW file.
This means that, no matter what white balance value you set in-camera, when shooting RAW the pixel data will be EXACTLY THE SAME.
Now, the downside of setting a specific white balance value is that only your custom white balance value will be stored in the metadata of your RAW files.
This means that you are LOSING an important reference value (two, actually, when you consider the tint shift) that you might later want to either use or at least reference when editing your photos.
So, if you shoot with AWB on in RAW format, not only do you preserve the camera’s in-moment interpretation of the light (WB and Tint), but you can modify the white balance to literally ANY value in post, and the result would be exactly the same as having shot in RAW with the same white balance value explicitly set.
TL;DR you lose nothing shooting RAW with AWB, but you lose useful reference values when shooting RAW with a specific white balance specified!
Finally, remember that you can always batch-set your WB to 5500 when importing your photos into your processing software of choice!
You don’t have just a “broad range of flexibility” when changing the white balance on a RAW… You have TOTAL flexibility!
Additional:
It IS a great idea to batch-set your RAW photos on import into your editing software to a WB of 5500K. You still preserve the metadata value for AWB and tint shift in the RAW (and you can compare the calculated with 5500K if you want to, as well).
I just strongly disagree that you should explicitly set your camera to shoot everything at 5500K. Sorry, but that is wholly unnecessary and you're sacrificing genuinely-important in-moment calculated information that absolutely can make a huge difference in post.
To give you an example: when shooting in an environment with multiple light sources with different colour temps, it's extremely useful to know what bias and/or balance your camera calculated for that shot so that you can calculate your own WB when post-processing the image (or even do masked WB adjustments to different parts of an image depending on the calculated colour tone of that light source)
And this video shows us how people desperately and blindly look for some sort of magic tricks from their favorite creators. Thanks a lot for your comment I thought whole wb range is saved in raw no matter what settings
You’re totally correct. That said, for my workflow I have no interest in what the camera AWB value would be (what you refer to as a reference value). It more important for me to have a consistent value from shot to shot as I take many frames of a subject over a period of time. So I set it to 5500k and forget it until I adjust in post. Yes your suggestion to import at 5500k accomplishes the same thing but I prefer a ‘one less thing to think about in cam’ approach. Horses for courses. Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
Great comment.thanks!
Yes, but if your are gonna do hundreds of shots under the same conditions, it can save you a lot of editing time if you set the WB on camera, even if you can bulk edit.
@@danielsantisteban How exactly does it save time?
You simply apply the 5500K white balance setting at the point of importing the RAW images into your editing application of choice.
It adds no time at all to do this (especially if you set it as your default)
The depth of your explanation and your visual props are what make you such a great communicator. The video length also hits the sweet spot. Thanks.
I have never thought of white balance this way before. Thanks for the clear explanation and offering this as food for thought. I think I'll give it a try!
Even with flash?
What about flash?
Flash anyone?
Is the flash even that fast? Anyone?
First new info from RUclips about photography in ages for me. Thank you Sean.
The watercolor on paper is great and gets the idea across without needing a bunch of motion graphics. Cleverly done.
I’ve been applying this advice since this video dropped and I swear my photography has improved DRAMATICALLY
In 38 years as a full time pro, I don' think I have ever used Auto White balance. I work in exactly the same way you do, I leave it set to 5600K. The only time I change it is if I have a colour critical job that needs to render truly accurate colours. In that case I use an X-Rite Colour Checker to create custom colour profiles. I've nothing against using auto, its just not what I do. I worked with film for so long, when I changed to digital white balance wasn't really something I thought about. I just used the camera as if it were loaded with daylight balanced film.
Great video Sean, I wish more people created content like yours, Thank you.
Maybe its the fact you learned to shoot with daylight balanced film so it just became natural. I leave it in auto, and make camera white balance shift slightly turned to amber.
Honestly canon auto wb works good for me, but I want to start shooting at manual because it gives richer colors when set correctly. I will try to keep it at 5500 for street photography, and try to implement that knowledge in my portrait and car shots
We were so happy to have the WB auto correction that we forgot that a white paper under a lamp should be orange 😅 Thanks for the reminder, great video as always! 👍 I'll definitely experiment more with the WB settings
There is no such thing as correct white balance, you may want a picture look one way or another. You may want to make a sunset very warm, for example. You may want to make a portrait look warmer, because it's more pleasant. That's why there are many presets to change the mood. It also isn't true that WB at 5500K would make the image look like what the eye sees in the same situation, not even close. In fact, setting the image to the correct temperature would look close to what the eye sees. Don't confuse it with calibration by using the gray card.
This is an absolute lightbulb (tungsten?!) moment. I've never seen anyone explain their thought process like this and it's going to be my approach from now on. Thank you
This video finally helped me understand why I was going insane trying to figure out why I wasn't able to get my camera to capture the colors I was seeing when photographing a night scene that had both warm and cool lighting.
You vastly underestimate how much our eyes adjust to light temperature, the pictures with AWB are closer to the scene when you saw it in person, not after the fact when viewing on a monitor with a different light temperature around.
Where I live sandstorms are a frequent occurrence, and going from the sepia-like outside to inside with a white or cool lighting makes interiors look freezing cold blue. White LEDs turn into blue neon, after a few minutes your eyes adjust and it's white again.
our minds actually fill in missing details. If we go into a scene that is lit up by tungsten, our eyes may adjust white balance slightly but its our minds that will make more sense of what the actuality might be. It really depends how familiar you are of that scene in different lights as to how you perceive it. That few minute adjustment you speak of is not a mechanism of the eyes but your brain making that adjustment. You could argue that the cold blue when you come back inside is the 'real' colour. Your eyes merely receive the information for our brains to process. It would be an interesting experiment to get people to reproduce colours of objects within an unfamiliar scene that is lit up by different kelvins of light to see how they are remembered.
@@livinagoodlife true that it's the brain doing the correction, as eyes are just receptors. But I find it hard to argue that the blue tone is the ground truth, because it's the result of being outside where everything is orange (think Breaking Bad Mexico filter, but even more intense), so your vision cools things down a lot. This results in a blue tone when going inside where there is "white" lighting because everything is blue-shifted.
@@livinagoodlife I only partly agree. One would need to read a paper on this, but here is what I personally observed and what you can try for yourself: Go outside on a sunny day, and let the sun shine directly into your face, but close your eyes. Instead of darkness, you will see red because the sun shines through the red blood in your eyelids. Stay like this for roughly two minutes. Then look away and open your eyes. You will be outside in a very familiar scene, but everything will look extremely cool, like you sucked the red color out of everything. This works by the same principle as when your eyes adjust to darkness, however just with one color. Of course this is a very extreme example, but by the same principle your eyes will adjust to every lighting condition if it is consistant enough, for example in a sandstorm like has been mentioned before, or if you stay in a room exclusively lit by tungsten light. And that has nothing to do with the brain. I do still think tho, that the brain plays a very significant role in the whole thing, but it's definitely not only the brain.
What you are both saying is valid but also fully subjective. None of it matters other than in theory as long as its a single image. As soon as its a series or even film with various scenes, for the sake of consistency in editing, color balance and aperture is everything. Only proper way is a colour chart as reference and color correction. But that is a step more complex than just white balance. In the end, if post editing is part of the workflow, AWB vs set value doesn't matter. Just two types of workflow. If the in-camera original is the end result then it highly matters.
Definitely our vision (better say our brain) adjusts WB all the time. Setting at 5500K will almost never be a perfect match.
One month later since changing this setting I think the quality of my work is better. Best advice I’ve gotten in a while. Thanks Sean for publishing this piece.
I’ve been shooting with digital cameras for 20 years now and have always used Auto White Balance, assuming I could just make changes in post. Thank you for giving me another way to think about this. I will give it a try for a while. Thanks, Sean, for making the most thoughtful videos out there.
The changes in post are much easier when all your photos start from a consistent point. After shooting in one WB setting for a while you begin to understand much better what changes you can make in post! I love it
@@Millie-um2bi "The changes in post are much easier when all your photos start from a consistent point."
I don't think this argument holds water. That's assuming you are shooting in consistent lighting. If not, this is not relevant. And even if it is, it's still something you can just sync across the entire series of shots. If you're in the same spot with same lighting, nothing prevents you from correcting a shot and later syncing that to the exact same value to other shots, and that works regardless if all shots are shot the same or each shot is completely different. Makes no practical difference.
Starting from a consistent point in varying light though only means that you are sometimes going to tweak by a lot and sometimes by a little, I don't see how this makes anything easier.
I'm doing photography for like 8 years now. Needless to say, you converted me to 5500k. I always shot on auto white balance. Those days are now behind me. Thank you very much!
Thanks for sharing this, Sean! I've never considered fixing my white balance this way, but it makes so much sense to do so for street photography. The joy of getting things to look closer to what the eye sees would help me be more happy with what I shoot, and potentially have less edits to make to photos. Thank you so much for sharing your process. Such an eye opener!
I’ve always set my camera on ‘daylight’ just because I was too lazy to always adjust my settings. And didn’t want auto because I never want my camera to make my decisions.
Being a landscape / nature photographer, it seems to work out well for me. Thanks for explaining it!!
Thank you a lot, this has been probably the best explanation of what balance is and how it works in camera and, most importantly, the different scenarios and the effect of choosing one setting vs the other. Greatly appreciated.
This video showed me I knew NOTHING about white balance. Thank you so much for making it clear. 😊
What I love about out you Sean, is that you are always in service to others. I hope you know just how much you are appreciated. This is the first time I’ve had the concept and use of white balance explained in this way and it makes so much sense. Keep doing what you’re doing!
Parable Volume 3 is on its way to me and I’m anxious to see what you’ve been up to.
This video has forever changed the way I take photos. Thank you for making it. Your work continues to inspire me on my path to making this my full time profession. Thank you!
My understanding of white balance was poorly lacking, but I did not know why, until now. Your video is a great example of taking an idea that appeared on the periphery (conversation with a friend) and making it into something that will resonate with many people. That is the art of it.
That was very technical for a change. And it mainly proved one point: "Shoot in RAW!"
(...then you can decide which WB you use later...)
Sean, you have no idea how much you've helped me with this video.
As an amateur photographer, I've always struggled to grasp the concept of white balance, to the point where I just left it on auto mode.
Your explanation completely blew my mind, it was incredibly clear and accompanied by simple examples.
Thank you SO much for that!
What a great explanation and video! Best cover of white balance I’ve seen…thanks for sharing!
I've used this method for several years now in my creative work. It's incredibly practical for multiple reasons. Love your explanations and your teaching method. Thanks for creating so much awesome content over all these years!
After 50 years of photography, hobby only, I realized the deep truth of how we see and yes, film was as it was. Digital wants to make it better, what is already perfect. Thank you.
Yes!
Beautiful creation!
Film cameras could not accurately depict what the human eye can see. Digital cameras are not yet able to, but they’re getting closer. Film was not “perfect” in the sense of color accuracy.
Film was terrible, use the wrong WB film and your images look bad. Most people were simply buying film rated for daylight and ended up with awful pictures indoors, at sunsets, etc. And even in daylight, the WB of the scenes changes and can result in very warm or very cold colors. It's rare when 5500K is the best match for the scene.
I HEAVILY appreciate this video, I struggle a lot with white balance. I will now just be shooting 5500 as well, thank you so much!
Wow I would of never thought of this approach. I can't wait to try this on my landscape photography. Thank you for sharing the knowledge.
Same here! I’m amazed no one has explained white balance like this before in the videos I’ve seen. This blows my mind!
Ive been shooting photos professionally for 10 years and this take just changed my perspective completely!
Great!
Great:)
Our job as photogs is to create, either in our style or the style desired by the client. For me, the bottom line is WB can be adjusted in post so I don't get too worried about setting in camera, except when I need to represent the actual color as it was during the shoot. So, like Sean, I prefer to stick with the basic 5500K unless there is a need for a specific setting.
Love this channel, always a fair, balanced and thoughtful approach to our craft... and Sean just seems like a darn decent human being!
Thanks so much Charles.
Of course, we all change WB in post when it's desirable. That's not the question. The question is how many pictures you would need to correct in post. When shooting with AWB (which is pretty good even in Sony cameras) you may end up with a few pictures needing correction. When you set it to 5500K you will have hundreds of pictures needing correction.
Good to know I'm not alone with this idea. I do the same and very rarely change the WB in my postprocessing work. I appreciate your time and effort making this for us.
"But raw files have a ton of latitude" - Not super important here, but WB settings or auto-WB do not affect the raw file at all, data captured is the same regardless. It will affect what is loaded into your processing application though.
Exactly!
I just wrote basically the same comment. The latitude part refers to exposure, but WB changes have zero effect on the quality of the file. It's not baking in.
Simply love your videos. My favorite is still "Protect your Highlights: A lesson for Light and Life" but truly appreciate all of them and the often extra dimension you apply. Being thoughtful.
Not surprisingly as I'm merely an amateur and Sean is one the best there is, I completely subscribe to what he says around minute 9. Perfect white balance robs ambiance but strictly staying at 5500K tends to exaggerate colour-casts the moment the lighting strays in either direction. Now obviously its a matter of personal preference if you want to keep it like that but I too tend to pull back a bit in post or if I remember, in camera.
One thing, Sean says RAW has a ton of latitude. He's oversimplifying for our benefit. RAW doesn't actually give a hoot about your white balance setting, that is applied afterwards during RAW conversion so you can put it anywhere you like and it shouldn't affect image quality in the slightest.
A bit more information that might interest some - First, daylight temperature depends greatly on where you are shooting. Generally the farther from the equator the further light from the sun has to travel through our atmosphere and this tends to absorb blue light, resulting in natural light at midday that is quite warm. Thus daylight in (say) Birmingham is a good deal warmer in tone that it is in Chennai (latitudes 52 north and 13 north respectively). The midpoint daylight setting in Chennai is not 5500K but 6400K. Shall I ramble on? This at first seems counterintuitive: why is the light in the tropics cool and in the arctic warm? Well perhaps simply because there were misnamed. A blue flame is hotter than a red-orange flame so whilst, if applied correctly, blues should have been called hot and reds cool, it turns out our brains start to break at that point. Because since we lived in caves we've associated a flickering orange fire with warmth and many a proto-human has probably singed his fur on a glowing red ember. Secondly, the interesting bit about daylight colour temperature is the effect it has on human culture. Because blue light is kind of cold and desaturating, can even look slightly metallic, tropical cultures love bright and saturated colours. You see it in the clothes, in the art and in the architectural decoration. And some may notice that the the same pink, green, turquoise and gold saree that looks quite opulent in Colombo looks frankly a bit garish when worn in New York, whilst tourists fresh off the plane from Malmo landing in Bangkok look somewhat wan and anaemic until they start to develop a bit of a tan.
Sorry for going on for so long. Colour fascinates me. :)
Edit: Just a footnote - I forgot to mention however that I slightly disagree with the bit around minute 12, that our eyes are daylight white balanced. First - daylight where? If I live all my life in Lagos (latitude 6N) it would be quite a handicap to have my eyes biologically set to 5500K. Secondly, most computers and phones you may have noticed have a night light setting to ease eye strain. This is because if you are in a tungsten lit room and someone hands you a sheet of white paper - you see a sheet of white paper. You do not see a sheet of orange paper, your brain (not your eyes) has already made the adjustment for you*. So here's a tip to help those of you who work late at your computers and suffer from eye strain. Hold a white piece of paper next to your monitor and then lower the temperature on your monitor until the screen and the paper look about the same. Second tip, reduce the brightness until that looks about the same too. Your eyes will thank you and as long as you are not doing colour critical work* you will soon forget that you have the night light setting on.
*however if they actually handed you a sheet of orange paper your brain might still see it as white. Because it matches the colour of the light, that's the point at which our brain can get fooled. For colour critical work therefore you need balanced lighting or if you know the lighting that will be used by your viewers you should work in similar light. Maybach and Lexus for example have light booths in their main showrooms where they can park the car and change the ambient light to match the light where you live. This way you can see what it will look like when you get it home.
I think if you shoot into the sun with auto white balance at Afternoon when the sun is exactly in the middle of the sky, you would probably get a more accurate number. for me its around 5100k which doesnt make sense but alright
Fascinating stuff! Thank you.
And the truth is that AWB will provide much better results than always keeping it at 5500K.
Sean, the concepts you share are very refreshing and transcend photography. Thank you for sharing your mindset.
Was out shooting yesterday and spent a good 2 hours searching for a proper white balance because I felt the auto settings were hindering my creativity, then you drop this video a day later. Right on time.
I only shoot the white balance in auto, because i could not find the right information. What was the difference for you those 2 hours ?
Mark
How can yo search for white balance? 🙈
@@LASHMAR almost everything on youtube
@@markankone9362 why not just put the camera in auto and fix it in Lightroom or photoshop in a second. Story and composition and character are surely what is important.
@@LASHMAR I suppose a better word is "experimenting" for a proper white balance? Yesterday I shot throughout the day in NYC, experimenting "in search of a proper white balance" of my liking, however, I came away undecided still due to my lacking a firm understanding of white balance.
As a begginer I have a feeling that this is one of the most important videos I watched, because I feel like I have an ok grasp of iso, aperture and shutter speed and how they affects exposure, as well as how depth of field more or less works, but I never understood what this white balance concept is until now. All I knew is the numbers refer to this yellow tint or blue tint or whatever but didn't know what the setting in the camera did so I always put it on auto or set it to tungsten in warm light or daylight in actual daylight and so on, and indeed I could never get a pictured that looked like what my eyes were seeing in a bar! I didn't know why until now, thank you so much, this was enlightening.
I leave it parked at 5200K, and shoot RAW so I can non-destructively change the white balance afterwards. You are losing NOTHING by changing RAW images afterwards, the in-camera settings are all just a viewing filter AFTER the data. This includes saturation, contrast, and sharpening.
I actually leave those settings at weak levels (-4) in camera so that I deliberately choose their values later.
However, in the case of white balance if I am indoors for a length of time I will adjust the white balance in camera because the images on the camera look even more yellow than real life. Matching your viewfinder or screen to real life can be a good technique.
For video it is more important to get the white balance right, because it IS baked into the file (except for RAW video), and while you can change it that process is destructive (but you probably won't notice).
I will knowingly adopt this. Been for years using AWB on my photography camera and trying to replicate in post. The vibe of the scene as I saw it.
The thing here, WB is very different if you shoot RAW and JPEG. It even applies differently in Lightroom depending on the file. If you shoot RAW it doesn’t matter what camera setting you have, you can edit it at pleasure.
5500k is as good a starting place as any for a raw file. if anything this technique might give you a better starting place as a "default" for what the scene looked like. but how it looked to your eyes at the time and how it should look in the finished photo aren't necessarily the same!
You're absolutely right, and he says the same thing by the end of the video; he just feels it's a better starting point for the tweaks you might want to make. For me it makes much sense, since it also tends to save me time at the computer. Of course not always what I saw at the moment of the shooting is the final image I want, but mostly I prefer to be faithful to the reality I perceived then.
I've watched many white balance videos over the last few days, this is the only one I needed. You have a brilliant way of explaining things, thanks Sean.
I’ve been working in broadcast TV for a number of years and this is how we shoot - WB is set to 5600 and left, so they have the latitude in the edit but mostly because they want the scene to look how it was, especially in factual entertainment where it needs to appear as it was at the time. Good video though and a supporter of the theory here 🤙
That's good confirmation.
Excellent advice. This is probably an area that many people never think about. Color balance can make an amazing difference in the look of your image. Thank you.
You’re amazing ❤
Thanks Sean, you’ve put into words an internal struggle I’ve often had setting a custom white balance on my camera by “correcting” the white balance of a sheet of paper or a white ceiling. I’m an amateur and have bought into the mantra that white must always look white, which in my heart I knew was wrong but never before realised why. Thank you.
No, you're approach isn't odd. A lot of us that started back in the film days shoot this way. There's nothing funnier than watching some young guy drag himself out of bed at stupid o'clock to photograph a sunrise, and end up with bland grey light, because they're wedded to auto-white balance. More than half of natural light photography is about capturing colour casts, and a good slice of strobe photography is about simulating them, and nothing kills it so well as auto white balance.
Auto WB doesn't kill anything, what kills is that people are adamant about keeping the white point exactly neutral. Which makes for "accurate" but boring images.
Shooting with Auto WB doesn't prevent anyone from changing the value later, it's also worth noting that most new cameras actually have 2 different AutoWB modes where one intends to keep things as neutral as possible and the other intends to keep the ambiance of the shot intact. If it's warm, it leaves it warm, if it's cool, it will leave it as such. This works very well and it is a big difference between the 2 modes.
Congratulations! This is the best white balance video I’ve seen in the past 10 years!
The best instruction I have ever received on RUclips! I learn so much on this platform, but this is totally next level.
I just ordered your digital library complete.
Thank you so much!
This is a crazy game changer. Switched off auto white balance and my shots look so much better. Living the way night photography comes out. Can really see the difference in the kinds of streetlights
This information has been one of the best I've got about settings of my cameras. I really appreciate it, because 5500K has solved so much of my struggles with WB. Thank you so much.
This is the absolute best white balance video I’ve come across. You sir are a master teacher. The simplification of a seemingly complex topic? Wow. Thank you. And your work is an inspiration 💗
Sean has mastered the art of teaching as well as he's mastered the art of shooting. Always an informative pleasure listening to his well thought out explanations. I learn something every time.
Dear Sean, thank you so much for this. I just cannot believe the difference this setting has made. For anyone like me who struggled to get better ‘results’ with their camera than ‘everyone’ was getting with a phone…well this is for them! Suddenly I am on to a whole new thing… THANKYOOOO 👍
Thank you for challenging photographers to think and decide for themselves. I recently went through this exact thought process, and I too found myself locking my camera on a daylight white balance. Thanks again for your thought provoking approach.
I always come back to this video. It is brilliant. Just got a new Panasonic GX85 w/ a Leica/Panasonic 15mm (30 equivalent) lens. I decided on 5600k white balance. Thank you as always! Brilliant videos.
I do something similar for the same reasons. I prefer things to look as I see them rather than to be color correct which most of the time is boring. But I just set it to daylight instead of kelvin which is almost the same. Great video!
Sean, tomorrow I am heading out the door with my white balance set on daylight. Yes, there have been moments in the past where I came home with some very strange colors. Never quite understood why. And tomorrow as day turns to night, I am leaving the daylight settings and will be watching for what happens. Thanks for this. By the way, I have been listening to your lectures for quite a long time. I have learned so much from you, not the least of which is to pay more attention to what effect I want than what others are speaking about what they want. Freedom. You are about freedom.
What a brilliantly simple and sensical approach. I'm going to adopt this. Thanks Sean. You are an excellent communicator / teacher by the way.
I was actually thinking these days about the white balance of film photography, and questioning why not do the same with my digital camera and set it to daylight always. Awesome, this video gave me the answer to that question. Thank you Sean.
Excellent point about WB, Sean - can’t believe I’ve never really thought it through! Thanks for doing it for me. 🙏
Brilliant! I'm what many would call a 'lazy photographer'........I have no form of qualification, and I've never cared for 'bogging' myself down with settings too much. My interests lie in capturing a moment, or a scene first and foremost, and so that often means that I simply favour shooting in auto. That being said, I've never fully understood white balance if truth be told, and this video has opened my eyes and given me something to think about. Expertly, visually demonstrated in an easy way to understand, and something I am definitely going to think about moving forward when I'm shooting. Thanks Sean!
Great introduction to the concept. One of the clearest I've seen I reckon.
I just want to mention (if anyone sees this!) that the actual data in a RAW file is completely unaffected by the white balance set in camera - that's only a bit of metadata. So you're really not loosing anything, from a technical perspective, by changing it in post.
Video is different though.
I love this approach that you take with white balance. I have been just setting the Kelvin to what I see as “real life” but in daylight viewing.
Your way of taking photos strictly at 5500 Kelvin is something I will have to use. Not to set and forget, but be more present while shooting and tweak afterwards.
Thank you Sean for your quality videos you make. You’re always an inspirational and thought provoking teacher. Keep up the great work!
As a beginner amateur photographer that barley knows how to shot manual. This makes absolutely freaking sense to me. I sometimes wonder why my pictures do not look like the scene I have. This is a trick I'll incorporate into my arsenal. Thank you.
Thank you for this valuable information. Never thought of white balance as you presented. As one who struggles with the "correct" white balance i want my images to match what I actually saw when i created them. This is inspiring.
As a wedding photographer, I subscribed when you said wedding photographers may not have time to fiddle with settings. I’ve shot a thousand+ weddings, and white balance isn’t something I need to get perfect on the day of, but it is something that constantly occupies 10% of my brainpower. Sometimes setting WB to auto allows me to put 100% of my creative energy into posing, composition, finding the perfect moment. It’s a RAW file anyway, and our editors will ALWAYS edit for proper skin tones. Great video!
Thank you for this tip, it has been a life saver.
I’ve always struggled to get my pictures to look as my eyes see the scene since moving to Sony and this has fixed 90% of the problem. Everything looks more realistic and as intended.
I do the same keeping my WB at 5600K. Glad I am not the only one!
Thanks Sean another really clear and pragmatic explanation that I will be able to use to reduce the need to put the perceived colour back in to get the atmosphere back in.
Absolutely the greatest explanation on WB I have ever heard and seen that has cleared this mystery up for me! It's always the simple things that bite the hardest Then when you hear and see the clarity, you wonder how you could not see it for yourself! It's because I've never seen it explained like this before! Thank you Sean! You have an amazing gift for teaching! Thanks for sharing!
Master of explanation. A great teacher….if anybody asked for an explanation of something, I’d direct them to your channel. I can see many photographers setting their WB to 5500k now from Auto, including myself! And for me, rightly so.
Thanks for this, your explanation was incredibly clear, and the video was well produced. A gem of a channel. Cheers!
Educational AND inspirational. What an art channel like yours should be all about. Thanks Sean for sharing your knowledge to us.
This bought back memories of shooting interiors on film, nightmare with gels and filters.
Great way of explaining this Sean.
First time viewer Sean, probably the best WB explanation. I was trying to reset my WB for an outing yesterday, but now have reset both of my cameras to 5500 & will give it a try.
Got this note from a college photo instructor years ago, blew my internet trained mind. I am glad someone has finally made a video about this!
From several years I asked myself that question without any serious thought. I'm glad that I saw this video, this answered that doubt.
Absolutely loved how you played with the white balance light when you were explaining! Stunning.
i love how you explain it and show the examples, that's increase my understanding about what's your talking about. thank for the video
Why have I never considered this before? It makes so much sense!
Thank you for the brilliant practical examples too :)
A tightly edited and thought-provoking video. This, and your last episode about Phil Sharp, are some of the most useful video’s I’ve seen in recent months. All the best.
Hi Sean
I learn so much from you when you deliver training through videos shot like this. I was new to photography 6 years ago and after watching your explanation on how to shoot manual I now shoot like that 80% of the time. You explain your message in simple ways using simple props and it is simply brilliant. I've missed this sort of educational video format since you left London.
Thank you for making another one. Looking forward to many more.
Andy
I'm a glad people are thinking more about how the camera interprets colors in their images! I would be careful with using white balance as a creative control though. White balance is used to control the center of the colors captured by the camera for all other color controls (e.g. saturation, hue, etc.). Definitely change the colors in your images in creative ways that depart from reality, just be careful with which controls you are using (and understand the impacts between the sliders)!
Small tip: most sensors today are daylight balanced to 5000k meaning they dont pull or push gain in red and blue channels and match our perception the best. 5600k is too cold and is more like flash and not real daylight.
So try setting the white balance to 5000 and forget it. You'll be blown away by the consistency
Thanks Sean for opening my eyes to white balance. It makes total sense to what your saying. I've been doing photography for over 40 years and never really put much thought into it after things went digital. Thanks again.
This how things worked in the film days. If you shot Kodachome your WB was fixed at 5600k.
In the digital age, I don't worry about it because I shoot RAW and it doesn't matter what the camera does. Setting WB to auto (shooting RAW) does nothing more than set your sliders in your posr-processing software. You can always change them in post with no consequences (and you probably) should.
I frequently set the white balance at the beginning of the day and then ‘fire and forget’ until I’m in Lightroom. This excellent video has given me a better understanding, I’m going to try Sean’s 5560k start point. Great job Sean explaining, informing and inspiring!
Man, thank you. I'm a total beginner and I understood right away as soon as you showed me. Can't wait to learn more from you!!!!
I saw this yesterday and went out for a quick shoot last night. I’m very thankful because I like seeing the bright colors that the daylight wb brought. More experimentation is due. Thanks and God bless you.
THANK YOU for explaining white balance VISUALLY for us visual learners!! I had a sneaking suspicion about what white balance was in adobe lightroom but didn’t know the mechanics behind it or how to manipulate it real time (not post production)
I've been a photographer for about 50 years and I understand white balance but I thought about it the same like you do. To me this is thinking out of box. Brilliant. Thanks a lot for sharing. One can always skin a cat in more then one way. Please keep on sharing your thoughts even if you think they are crazy. Some people might like them.
Love the demonstration with the water color bar across the temperature range. I usually left WB alone, or set it to a specific K value to generate a specific look. This feels like it opens up options to not only capture things as I see them, but provide an extra way to give a feeling to the images I create.
Hello Sean, I wanted to say thank you. I've been photographing for 6 years now, and I've always struggled with it constantly rushing for the 'best photo' or 'perfect composition,' and so on. Not long ago, I discovered that I have complete multisensory aphantasia, and it was incredibly discouraging. I thought I would never be able to become an artist that I could be proud of. Your videos and your approach have helped me a lot. I don't know if you will read this message, but I wanted you to know how grateful I am. 😊