What is White Balance?
Ever wondered why your subjects turn out yellow when photographing them in indoor environments? Or why your camera flash can make them appear blue? Thoroughly understanding the concept of white balance and how it works is very important in digital photography, because setting it incorrectly could ruin a picture, adding all kinds of unwanted color casts and causing skin tones to look very unnatural.
Definition of White Balance-
White balance in digital photography means adjusting colors so that the image looks more natural. We go through the process of adjusting colors to primarily get rid of color casts, in order to match the picture with what we saw when we took it. Why do we have to do this? Because most light sources (the sun, light bulbs, flashlights, etc) do not emit purely white color and have a certain “Color Temperature". The human brain processes the information that comes from our eyes and automatically adjusts the color temperature, so we normally see the colors correctly.
Here is an example of both correct and incorrect White Balance:
As you can see, the image of the child on the right feels more natural and the skin tones look correct, while the image on the left is too yellow. The first image clearly needs its white balance adjusted to eliminate the yellow tones.