White balance

White balance is a color adjustment made in software to correct any color shift in the ambient light to make it neutral – to 'balance' the light so that it's a pure, neutral white.

White balance is one of those camera controls that's easy to take for granted but it can be quite important. If you photograph weddings, for example, you need to make sure that white wedding dresses, veils and cakes are actually reproduced as white.

If you shoot JPEGs, getting the white balance right is especially important, because while you can change the colour rendition later, your window for adjustment is much smaller.

Shooting RAW files, however, gives you full control, since you can choose any white balance setting you like – the RAW file preserves all the colour information captured by the camera.

Even here, though, there are a couple of things to be aware of. Your software's 'As Shot' setting is the only one which will accurately portray the camera's own rendition – other white balance presets in the software may not give you the same results that the camera's presets would give you. Adobe's white balance presets, for example, always look very warm to me.

One of the chief advantages of shooting RAW, though, is that you can quickly standardised the white balance setting across a whole series of images – this is what non-destructive editing and cataloguing tools like Lightroom and Capture One Pro do especially well.