If your goal is to have a good quality image, then you need to understand the concept of "white balance". If desired, you can configure it in the camera immediately before shooting, or you can afterwards, using special programs for image processing.
So, there is the concept of the color temperature of light, which should be understood before proceeding to determine what it is - the white balance. Everyone knows that light coming from different sources has a different color. In physics, this fact is explained as follows: if any physical body of black color is heated, it will begin to emit electromagnetic waves, which will be distributed in the infrared range. When the temperature rises, the waves move into the visible light range. For example, a black body, heated to 1800-2000 Kelvin, will emit a light red-orange color.
The radiation spectrum begins to shift in a colder direction if the temperature rises, changing from yellow to green, blue, and so on, passing to ultraviolet and radio waves. For convenience of terminology, the shade of light is usually characterized by the color temperature, which is denoted in the Kelvin. White balance in this case is a very important indicator. The human eye perceives a white color , regardless of what kind of lighting is around, but it can also fail. If you quickly enter the room from a street where it is very sunny, the first few seconds everything will be seen with a yellow tinge until the vision adapts to the new conditions. The visual analyzer works in the human brain , and in modern cameras an electrical one called "automatic white balance" is used. It is very good, if the camera independently sets the value of this indicator or allows you to use certain presets so that its owner can do it manually.
Usually, the white balance in a photograph taken by modern cameras can be adjusted by means of the following presets:
- Auto - automatic mode, excellent for daylight shooting, when the sun is the main source of light. It is also useful when there is a constant change in lighting, which makes it difficult to determine the light temperature.
- Daylight is a day mode, with the camera itself adding warm colors to the frame.
- Cloud - cloudiness, thus there is an addition of warm tones.
- Shade - the shadow. Here the previous setting is used, but warm tones are added even more.
It should be said that these are not all possible settings, but the main ones. White balance can be adjusted manually, but this should be considered in sufficient detail in a separate article. To quickly cope with the configuration tasks, you can take a picture of a sheet of white paper, and then rummage through the camera settings to get the best result. The white balance in Photoshop is configured quite simply, for this there is an instruction in the program itself. Such an option is convenient in the case when the picture can not be resized, but it is necessary to make a high-quality image.