White Balance vs Exposure#122

White Balance vs Exposure#122

Photographers often confuse proper exposure and white balance. When photographers have the wrong white balance, they often feel like the result is an exposure problem when it's really a color problem. For instance, if you shoot outside with a white balance of tungsten, also known as incandescent, your entire photo will be bluish. And when this happens, most photographers think that the problem is that their image is overexposed, when in fact it's properly exposed but the entire image is blue.

If you shoot the same scene with the proper white balance setting, you'll notice that the histogram is the same as the blue image, but it will feel like it was properly exposed. If you're shooting in RAW, this really doesn't matter, as the white balance is not baked into your shot. But if you're shooting in JPEG, you'll need to fix the problem before you walk away from the scene. When you're evaluating an image, ask yourself, does the picture have a strange color cast? If so, you have a white balance problem.

If instead the image feels too bright or too dark, you have an exposure problem.

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