MOBILE PHOTOGRAPHY — WHITE BALANCE

White Balance in Mobile Photography

White balance has an important role in photography. White balance is something which has a direct connection with the temprature of the picture. It tells the intensity of the light.

While clicking the pictures, not all lights are equal. Here I am not talking about the quality of light but the different colours of light, which are referred to as colour temperature.

How to understand the nature of image ?

When the image is more blue in tone, the image is cooler, and when the image is red in tone, the image is warmer.

When we are clicking the picture in manual mode, we get the option of controlling some settings for the picture. White balance is one of them. Even in manual mode, we can keep the white balance in auto mode, but if we need to keep the temprature of the picture according to our connivance, we have that option.

We can adjust the kelvin value setting to a higher number, which is cool, or a lower number, which is warm, according to the situation.

Different Kelvin Values in White Balance

While clicking in manual mode, we keep the white balance setting according to the scene we are clicking on. Every white balance setting has its own kelvin values, which is known as Kelvin temprature.

I have clicked some pictures in some white balance settings, which you can see further.

Some of the white balance settings are incandescent (2500 to 3000 K), daylight (5500 to 6500 K), fluorescent (4000 to 5000 K) and cloudy (6500 to 8000 K).

Effect of White balance on an image

These are the results of clicking pictures in daylight with different white balance settings and keeping the other settings in manual mode as Auto.

These are the results of clicking pictures in low light with different white balance settings and keeping the other settings in manual mode as Auto.

Now while seeing this picture, you might think that these pictures are looking so dull, so let’s jump to that.

Relation between White balance , ISO and Shutter speed

So you can see in this image that by keeping the ISO at 1600 and the shutter speed at 2, the image becomes clearer and brighter.

I am not saying that you should keep your settings exactly like this, but the main point is that while changing the ISO values and shutter speed values, the image becomes better than before.

Thanks for reading.

Saket Kumar, Signing off!