So now you know about white balance, color temperature, what the settings on your camera mean, and some guidance on when to use them.

Now comes the kicker:

If your camera supports RAW mode and you use it, you can forget about setting the white balance in your camera ever again.

When you shoot a JPEG file on your camera, the camera takes the information from the sensor, the white balance setting, and then creates an image file with all of the colors shifted around according to the white balance. Although you can tweak the colors in photoshop later, you really can't fully change the white balance once an image has been generated. It simply changes too much about the relative amounts of each color and can cause some information to be lost entirely if not set correctly.

When you shoot a RAW file on your camera, the camera dumps the information from the sensor into a file with little or no processing and makes note of what the white balance was set to at the time. You can later set the white balance to whatever you want when converting the RAW image into a final image.

That means that later on, when you want to convert the RAW file into a JPEG on your computer, you can change the white balance to whatever you want then. However, if you want to use a custom white balance setting, be sure to shoot one frame with the reference card you want to set the white balance on each time you change subject lighting for the session.

The picture shown here is the same image out of the camera that I've just set the white balance to different settings in the RAW converter to show the effects of each setting on the final colors of the frame.

So now you know about white balance, color temperature, what the settings on your camera mean, and some guidance on when to use them.

Now comes the kicker:

If your camera supports RAW mode and you use it, you can forget about setting the white balance in your camera ever again.

When you shoot a JPEG file on your camera, the camera takes the information from the sensor, the white balance setting, and then creates an image file with all of the colors shifted around according to the white balance. Although you can tweak the colors in photoshop later, you really can't fully change the white balance once an image has been generated. It simply changes too much about the relative amounts of each color and can cause some information to be lost entirely if not set correctly.

When you shoot a RAW file on your camera, the camera dumps the information from the sensor into a file with little or no processing and makes note of what the white balance was set to at the time. You can later set the white balance to whatever you want when converting the RAW image into a final image.

That means that later on, when you want to convert the RAW file into a JPEG on your computer, you can change the white balance to whatever you want then. However, if you want to use a custom white balance setting, be sure to shoot one frame with the reference card you want to set the white balance on each time you change subject lighting for the session.

The picture shown here is the same image out of the camera that I've just set the white balance to different settings in the RAW converter to show the effects of each setting on the final colors of the frame.