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Setting the Mood With Color - 2/2/09

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Mismatching white balance makes for great color effects

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Sometimes the right white balance creates the wrong picture effect. When I recently photographed a puppet-maker’s shop I found the place fascinatingly odd—a workshop combination of cobbler, toymaker and sculptor. I realized that these interesting pieces could be photographed to look a little more interesting—even strange and disconcerting. After all, the workbench was filled with all manner of smiling, disembodied heads.

Unfortunately for me, under normal lighting and with a normal white balance, the pictures aren’t particularly noteworthy at all. That’s because the mood set by a normal white balance is often too normal. I knew that if I adjusted the white balance in the puppet maker’s workshop I could change the feel of the scene entirely.

There are two primary ways to change a digital image’s white balance: in the camera or in the computer. The in-camera method is nice if you know the effect you want to achieve. Doing it in the computer, however, affords you the time and ability to make dramatic changes and experiment, and then subtly fine-tune the color balance as the image gets close to the desired effect. If you shoot RAW, adjusting the white balance in the computer ultimately has the same effect as adjusting it in camera—except that you have even more control and freedom to experiment.

When I got my normally-exposed images into my computer, I decided that I could change the whole mood of the pictures in two main ways—and I’d experiment to figure out what works best. First, I could move the white balance into the warm orange and red range to make the images feel more tense and discomforting. (There’s a reason, after all, that image-makers for centuries have used the color for dramatic emotional effect.) My other option was to move into the blue spectrum, mimicking the dark blue hues used in scary movies to symbolize deep shadows and dark-of-night scary scenes.

White balance adjustments are simple enough to make—you just have to think to make them. Utilizing your preferred adjustment tool—whether that’s Adobe Camera RAW, your camera-maker’s software, Apple’s Aperture, or any number of other image processing programs—just slide the white balance adjustment to change the color temperature of the image. Most programs, like cameras, include presets for different light sources (such as tungsten, daylight and fluorescent) and even spaces for numerical color temperatures. However you make the change, the effect is the same; a strong mood is created in the photo.

White balance works by telling the computer that a photo was made under a different colored light source, so the computer (or camera) compensates accordingly to make sure whites look white and all other colors are true. But being able to effectively fool the white balance is just as important to create the look you want for your images. If that look should be hot or tense, consider moving into the warm red realm. For a cooler, colder, and darker feel, cool blue hues can do the trick. And don’t feel like you have to make wide swings in a picture’s color temperature to achieve the desired effect either. Sometimes subtle shifts in color are just enough to create the most appropriate mood for your photographs—and those shifts probably come from adjustments to the white balance.

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