#Color temperature conversion chart full

You can also tune the colors if you you want a warmer or cooler look. You might get a color balance that looks better to you at something other then the preset options. They may depend on time of day, how thick the clouds are etc. Why would you do this? Well both the 'sunny' and 'cloudy' settings are just general guesses. By choosing the Kelvin white balance option you can choose something between 'Sunny' (5200K) and 'Cloudy' (6000K), for example 5682K. For example, as shown in the table above for the Canon EOS 7D, the 'sunny' WB setting corresponds to 5200K (don't worry what 'K' is for now, I'll deal with that later), the 'cloudy' WB setting corresponds to 6000K and the 'shade' WB setting corresponds to 7000K. The K or Kelvin setting allows finer control. A higher K value makes images look warmer, a lower K value makes images look cooler.Įxamples of various different white balance settings applied to the same image On the other hand if you were shooting in sunlight but wanted the image to look cooler, you could select the 'fluorescent' color balance. If you want it to look warmer still you could select the 'shade' white balance. For example if you want the image to look 'warmer' and you are shooting in sunlight, you could select the 'cloudy' white balance. You can also choose one of the preset options if you don't want 'correct' colors. As long as your lighting doesn't change the images should be consistent in color. In this case the digital filter the camera uses to obtain the colors will be exactly the same from shot to shot.

#Color temperature conversion chart full

full sun, cloudy sky, deep shade etc., you can set white balance to one of those values. The filter setting it selects may be slightly different on every shot, even shots taken under the same lighting, but generally it gives pretty good results. While not perfect, the camera will analyze the image and use built in algorithms to make a best-guess at what digital filter will give the most accurate colors. When you're rapidly moving from indoors to outdoors and from sun to shade and you want the camera to try to do most of the work for you, choosing Auto white balance is a good idea.

Most digital cameras, from high end DSLRs to simple P&S digicams, have a number of white balance settings such as Auto, Sunny, Cloudy, Shade, Flash, Fluorescent, Custom and Kelvin. I'll get to the full explanation later in this article, but I'll start out with basic, practical information. That's the simple explanation, but there's a lot of digital technology and physics behind it. White balance is simply a 'digital filter' which corrects an image for the color of the light source in order to record and display an image with the correct colors. White Balance and Color Temperature made simple