White Balance:

White balance just means adjusting colours so that the image looks more natural. We go through the process of adjusting colours  to get rid of colour casts in order to match the image to what we saw while capturing the frame. Factors such as sunlight, lightbulbs and flashlights do not emit purely white light and have a certain ‘colour temperature’. This can cause parts of images to appear different colours on camera than what the eye sees.

In a non digital way this can be demonstrated with the use of tinted glasses or goggles. For example if you are skiing with yellow tinted goggles on, the snow will look yellowish. However, after you ski for a little bit, your eyes and your brain will adjust for the colour and the snow should look white again. When you take off your ski goggles after skiing, the snow will look bluish in colour rather than pure white for a little bit, until your brain adjusts the colours back to normal again. This is done automatically for us. The white balance setting on a camera is just the manual version of this.

Examples of my experiment in outdoor lighting:

Setting – 1/4000, f5.6, ISO 400

Examples of my experiment in indoor lighting:

Setting – 1/30, f5.6, ISO 400