WhiBal Makes It Easy

Thanks to Joe, I got a WhiBal card. It's the pocket sized version. Thought I'd make a demo image for today's blip.

If the image doesn't make sense, here's a brief and rough explanation: Most light sources are not pure white, particularly incandescent light bulbs which are more orange in colour, and more so with age, so your images typically have some sort of tint to them. The above image was taken under incandescent lighting. The left hand side is what comes out of the camera with no processing. As you can see it has an orange cast to it.

Using software you can adjust the white balance so that the light seems white and you see the true colours of the image. Using the WhiBal card for reference makes this trivial to do. The right hand side shows the image with the adjusted white balance so the light source seems pure white. No other processing was done to the image, only WB. As you can see the orange cast is gone. Yay!

NOTE: I shoot RAW format so doing WB adjustments is no problem. I'm not so sure that the same can be said for shooting JPEGs. For JPEGs the WB has already been baked into the image, so to speak, so it might be very hard to adjust the WB further.