Camera White Balance

Official terminology :

On professional-level cameras, it can mean the white balance operation as described below (which is actually quite manual). This is because in professional situations, a "manual white balance" can mean altering colours using specialised vision processing equipment.

1. If your camera has a filter wheel (or if you use add-on filters), make sure you are using the correct filter for the lighting conditions.
2. Point your camera to a pure white subject, so that most of what you're seeing in the viewfinder is white. The subject should be fairly matte therefore non-reflective.
3. Set your exposure and focus.
4. Activate the white balance by pressing the button or throwing the switch. The camera may take a few seconds to complete the operation, after which you should get a message (or icon) in the viewfinder.
   Hopefully this will be telling you that the white balance has succeeded - in this case, the camera will retain it's current colour balance until another white balance is performed.
   If the viewfinder message is that the white balance has failed, then you need to find out why. A good camera will give you a clue such as "colour temperature too high". In which case change filter and also try opening or closing the iris a little.

Example :

Note: Advanced camera operators occasionally trick the camera into reading an inaccurate white balance, in order to make the pictures appear warmer or cooler .

Reasons for changing white balance :

You can change the white balance to create a different atmosphere within the image. For example as seen above you can give an image a much happier and warmer feel (more orange) but you can also make your image appear much colder and blue giving it a mysterious/dull feel. This is useful as it can give your image much more impact and become much more intriguing to the eye when done well.