It has been a while since my last post and all I can say is I just haven’t been taking many photos lately. So for this post I thought that white balance would be a good topic. I have made some progress in my post-processing skill set, so maybe I can share some of my newfound knowledge with the readers of this blog about my journey into photography.
Ok, that is not quite true. My skill and knowledge level are not sufficient to actually discuss white balance to any meaningful degree, however, I do want to show you a few examples of how changing white balance does make a big difference in some photos. The first example is a photo of a squirrel sitting in a tree. Fortunately, it was taken at sunset so the background has some color. When I opened the photo in Adobe Lightroom it had a blue tone even though I had set the white balance in camera and thought it would look better than it did. Here is the picture:
I then started to adjust the white balance by selecting the different options in the drop down menu. None of them looked very good. As a last resort, I just started to move the temperature slider to the right to warm the photo and the results were a significant improvement. Here is the same picture after the white balance has been warmed.
Probably a little over cooked but it is more pleasing to my eye. My next picture is a photo that was converted to black & white in Lightroom. First, let me show you the original color photo.
When I converted it to black & white I set the white balance to Tungsten and the tones in the photo were much more muted. I also noticed that the street lights looked more like starbursts.
To wrap up, I decided to see how the color photo would look if I used Tungsten for the white balance. Here it is.
Obviously a really bad photo. As I said at the beginning, my knowledge of white balance is not very good. These experiments did teach me that in the future, I will pay more attention to this aspect of editing photos because it could help to improve some photos tremendously.
I hope you enjoyed this post and will visit again in the near future to see if I have made any progress in my journey into photography.
C'est la vie 