One of the trickiest aspects of photography is lighting. Balancing natural light sources with artificial ones can be a real challenge for beginner shutterbugs, especially if they rely on their bare eyes to white balance.
Regardless of how fancy your camera, there’s no replicating the human eye when it comes to color conversion. Subtle shifts in color go largely unnoticed by cameras, especially in low-light situations. You can see this quite clearly if you snap a few photos in a dimly lit room. Whereas a camera may see the dim artificial light as white, our eyes may read it as red. Likewise, if you are trying to snap a photo outside using the sun as your light source, your eye will likely balance to white, while your camera will take a photo that paints the scene in a bluish hue.
Having some basic knowledge of color temperature or the Kelvin scale will serve you well if you are looking to take professional-looking pictures. The main reason is that color connotes different kinds of emotion. For example, blue tends to trigger a cold feeling, while red and yellow translate into a feeling of hope. An advanced photographer knows how his camera will read different types of light and can adjust accordingly. In most cases, color challenges can be fixed by turning on your camera’s white balance feature. By controlling this feature you can manipulate light and make it work for you.
When in doubt consult your camera’s manual. There should be directives regarding the white balance feature. For example, in most cases the auto white balance will attempt to white balance any shot regardless of the light sources, meanwhile the daylight feature is designed to add a hint of blue to your shot, and the cloudy symbol adds some red or yellow to warm up a shot taken in low-light situations.
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