Every light source has its own temperature. There’s a big difference between the sun and an incandescent bulb. The human eye and brain can join forces to convince us that whites are white under every light, but a camera needs to be told. How?

Basically the only thing you need for a photo is light. But unfortunately when you’re out shooting you’ll run into a lot of types of lighting, each with its own color. When there’s more than one source in the same scene, they can cause some real problems.

While the human eye can easily adjust to changing light colors, a camera doesn’t have it so easy here. Because of this, you have to let it know when its coloring of a scene differs from reality. The way to do this is via camera modes or automatic white balance. In the following article we’ll take a look at how to fine-tune a scene’s colors so that they match reality.