What is white balance in photography?

[photography]

White balance is the camera setting that adjusts the color temperature of your photos to make the image look more natural. It helps remove unnatural color casts (e. g., too yellow or too blue) caused by different light sources, such as daylight, tungsten, or fluorescent lights.

[matchrestore]

Lighting Designer here: Our eyes automatically adjust to the color temperature of the light sources around us. We perceive the light from our living room lamps as white, same as sunlight outdoors, but in reality they have a very different color temperature- the living room lamp is going to be around 2700 Kelvin and the sunlight is going to be around 5200 Kelvin. Other light sources such as fluorescent fixtures, commercial LED lights, candles, etc all can have different color temperatures.

While our eyes/brain adjust our perception of that light so it looks correct automatically, a camera sensor always senses light the same way. Adjusting the white balance in the camera tells the sensor to adjust the way it records the color of the light that hits its sensor to compensate for different color temperatures. Auto white balance can work much the same way that our brain perceives color, but can be a bit off depending on what is in the frame (for example a TV screen might trick the camera's auto white balance into thinking the ambient light is "cooler" than it actually is), so sometimes you need to manually set the white balance. A manual white balance also helps if you're taking a lot of photos in the same setting so they all have the same color tone to them - the auto white balance won't make small adjustments between each photo.

[Deepinthought345]

Someone told me once that the simple reason why we need to do white balance is because pure white contains all the colors in their purest form, so under a certain tint if we manage to get white to look pure, we get back the purity of the other colors over the tint.

[ArrowheadSW]

You describe it well. Without proper white balance, or the exposure made with the wrong color temperature, the photo could have an orange, blue, magenta, or green cast to it. It is correctable with modern photo editing software.

[ChicoFromThe305]

You seem to know a lot more than me about photography

[Anonymous]

Why answer your own question?

[Anonymous]

I have no idea.