Identifying and Correcting Color Casts

Have you ever taken a picture with a digital camera, or shot some video on vacation, only to get home and find that your footage is inexplicably orange, or blue, or green? What you’re seeing is an incorrect white balance, often referred to as a color cast.

Every light source has a different color temperature. Each of the three types of light sources you’ll typically encounter—incandescent (tungsten), fluorescent, and sunlight—produce light with strengths in different parts of the visible spectrum. Most of the time, you don’t consciously notice these color temperatures, because the human eye is extremely adaptive, automatically doing the equivalent of white balancing everything you see after a moment. Also, your perception of what is white and what is black is relative to the surrounding colors.