A white shirt looks white to you under a candle, a fluorescent tube or midday sun — but the light hitting it is wildly different in colour each time. Your brain compensates automatically. A camera has to be told what "white" is, and that instruction is white balance.

The Kelvin Scale

Colour temperature is measured in Kelvin. Counterintuitively, lower numbers are warmer (oranger) and higher numbers are cooler (bluer):

  • 1500–2000 K — candlelight, very orange.
  • 2700–3000 K — warm household bulbs.
  • 4000 K — cool white fluorescent, early morning.
  • 5500–6500 K — midday daylight, electronic flash. The reference "neutral".
  • 7000–10000 K — shade and overcast, quite blue.

Setting the camera's white balance to the light's temperature neutralizes the cast. Set it lower than the actual light and the photo goes blue; set it higher and it goes orange.

Why Photos Look Orange Indoors

Indoor bulbs are around 2700 K. If your camera assumes daylight (5500 K), everything shifts strongly orange. Auto white balance usually catches this — but it guesses from the scene content, and it fails predictably when:

  • A single strong colour dominates the frame (a red wall, a green field). The camera "corrects" that colour toward neutral and skews everything else.
  • The scene is deliberately warm — a candlelit dinner, a sunset. Auto neutralizes exactly the atmosphere you wanted.
  • Mixed lighting is present, which is the hardest case.

Mixed Lighting Is the Real Problem

A room with a window on one side and tungsten lamps on the other has two different light colours in one frame. No single white balance setting fixes both: correct for the window and the lamp side goes orange; correct for the lamps and the window side goes blue.

Practical fixes, in order of effectiveness:

  1. Turn off the room lights and use only window light.
  2. Match the sources — daylight-balanced bulbs, or gels on the lamps.
  3. Move the subject so only one light source reaches them.
  4. Convert to black and white if the mix is unfixable; it removes the problem entirely.

The RAW Advantage

This is the single most useful thing to know: RAW files store white balance as an instruction, not as baked-in colour. You can change it afterwards with no quality loss at all. A JPEG has the white balance applied permanently, and correcting a strong cast later costs colour accuracy.

If you shoot anything with tricky lighting — indoors, events, mixed sources — shooting RAW turns white balance from a decision you must get right into one you can defer.

Setting It Deliberately

  • Auto for changing conditions and casual shooting.
  • A preset (daylight, cloudy, tungsten) when the light is consistent — this also keeps a whole series of photos matching, which auto does not.
  • Custom / grey card for product photography and anything where colour accuracy is contractual.
  • Deliberately "wrong" as a creative choice: keeping a sunset warm, or cooling a scene for a cold mood.

Consistency matters as much as accuracy. A set of photos with slightly warm but *identical* white balance looks professional; a set where auto white balance drifted between frames looks careless, and fixing it later means matching every image by hand.