White Balance

In the previous section I mentioned the term white balance a few times. This is a very, very important fundamental to understand, especially with food photography, since it deals with color balance in the image, and a food’s colors can greatly affect its visual appeal. It’s called white balance because the overall intent is to make sure that the whites are actually white and that the balance of color in the photograph is true to its original color, depending on the type of light it was photographed in.

To get a bit deeper into understanding this (without going too geeky), I’ll start by defining white balance and why we have it. Basically, different light sources give off different temperatures of light, measured in Kelvin, and your camera has settings that sync the two so that the color of your image is as true to its natural state as possible. The settings on digital cameras usually will say things like Cloudy, Daylight, or Fluorescent (among a few other settings). Most of the time these are just averages of what the color balances typically look like in each of these situations. There’s also a setting on most cameras that lets you dial in the specific Kelvin temperature of the light, if you know it. In Figure 1.1, I show the same scene photographed at different white balance settings—it’s not too difficult to see which ones look best.