White Balance & Color
Light has a color. Candlelight is warm and orange, open shade leans cold and blue, midday sun sits somewhere neutral — your eyes adjust without noticing, but your camera doesn't always. White balance is how you tell it what 'white' should look like, so colors come out true instead of dipped in orange or drained to blue. Then comes the fun part: once you can get color right, you can get it wrong on purpose — warm for cozy, cool for calm — because color is one of the quietest, strongest ways a photo sets a mood. Four shoots, no exposure dials, just color.
4 lessons, easy to ambitious — free to read, free to shoot.
- 1Match the LightFind a shot coming out too orange or too blue, then fix the color by switching your white balance off Auto to the preset that matches your light.
- 2Auto vs. a PresetShoot the same tricky-light scene twice — once on Auto white balance, once on the preset that matches the light — and compare which gets the color right.
- 3Warm vs. CoolPhotograph the same subject two ways — pushed warm (golden and cozy) and pushed cool (blue and calm) — to feel how color temperature sets the mood.
- 4Creative White BalanceBreak the 'correct color' rule on purpose — make a photo whose deliberate color cast, warm gold or cool blue, is the whole point of the shot.
Shoot this tree, assignment by assignment.
A free account turns reading into doing — place your proof shots, earn the XP, and master White Balance & Color for the True Colors badge.