Orange colored people…  what’s up with that?   What’s happening when your camera records the image in colors other than what you thought?

Did you know that our eyes automatically adjust to the change in the color of many kinds of light.  Your camera doesn’t.   What it does do is guess.   The camera in your tablet or smart-phone needs to be told what the color temperature of the light you’re shooting in is.  Is it warm? Cool? Or, some color in between?   This is usually a camera setting called  “white balance”.   It allows you to tell the camera what type of light (incandescent, sunlight, or fluorescent) you’re shooting in.

iPhones and iPads have an automatic white balance function in the device’s camera.  Many of the camera apps you can buy for the iPhone and iPad  allow you to either use the automatic white balance function in the camera or, manually set the white balance yourself.   To White Balance: hold a sheet of white paper or a grey card in front of the camera so that it fills the frame and is  illuminated by the light in the scene; then lock the white balance button in the camera app.

Many other types of camera phones with Android and Windows operating systems allow you to select white balance as either:  Automatic, Daylight, Cloudy, Incandescent, and Fluorescent.  See the table below.

Light from a match, incandescent light bulb, and candle flame are all considered warm.   As you can see from the chart below, light during the day changes from warm at sunrise/sunset to cool at mid-day.    Other lights are different colors.  Mercury vapor lamps produce a bluish-green light.  High pressure sodium street lamps produce an orange-yellow glow.  Fluorescent bulbs can be green, warm, or white.  

 

Temperature	Source
1,700 K	Match flame
1,850 K	Candle flame, sunset/sunrise
2,700–3,300 K	Incandescent lamps
3,000 K	Soft (or Warm) White compact fluorescent lamps
3,200 K	Studio lamps, photofloods, etc.
3,350 K	Studio “CP” light
4,100–4,150 K	Moonlight[2]
5,000 K	Horizon daylight
5,000 K	tubular fluorescent lamps orcool white/daylight compact fluorescent lamps (CFL)
5,500–6,000 K	Vertical daylight, electronic flash
6,200 K	Xenon short-arc lamp[3]
6,500 K	Daylight, overcast
5,500–10,500 K	LCD or CRT screen
15,000–27,000 K	Clear blue poleward sky