Exercise 28: Judging Color Temperature

The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate the effect of White Balance (WB) on color. Of the several definitions I found on the web, Ken Rockwell's seems the most straightforward:

White Balance is nothing more than an adjustment to get the color you want. 

The idea here is that the only "neutral" light is that found on a clear day at noon.  This is the standard against which all other colors are judged.  Basically, color moves along a continuum of blue to red, with white in the center.  The WB feature acts like a filter to block particular wavelengths and give a different color to an image.

The effects of this are evident in the collage above, which consists of three set-ups:

1. Midday direct sunlight
2. Midday shade
3. Late afternoon direct sunlight

For each set-up, four images were produced using the following WB settings:

1. auto
2. direct sunlight
3. shade
4. cloudy

A few patterns are obvious.

1. The images taken in the shade at midday (middle row) appear cooler than those taken in direct sunlight (upper row), with the exception of the image shot in shade with Shade WB.
2. Shade WB adds more red, as can be clearly seen in the images in the third column.  
3. Cloudy WB (fourth column) adds slightly less red than Shade WB.
4. Auto WB (first column) appears more like I remember the colors as I saw them in situ.

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