Digital Focus: Use White Balance for Special Effects

Use this obscure feature to add warmth and mood to photos.

Dave Johnson

Feature: Getting the Most out of White Balance

Is your digital camera like the basement? You know, there are things down there you just never touch: Old paint cans; tools that you never figured out how to use; and a whole slew of electrical, ventilation, and plumbing controls that might as well operate someone else's house, for all the time you've spent looking at them.

Your digital camera has its own basement, and right at the bottom of the stairs is the white balance control. What does it do? And why should you care? Well, after you've read this newsletter, I hope you're going to try taking better pictures by messing with your camera's white balance settings.

What Is White Balance?

Digital cameras are unique because they have a little control called "white balance." Traditional film cameras don't have anything like it. So what the heck is white balance? In a nutshell, different light sources have different color temperatures, meaning that a scene will appear to have a different color tone depending upon how it is illuminated.

You can get a sense of this yourself. Candlelight appears more yellowish than sunlight, for instance. And other sources--like tungsten lights--can cast strange, greenish glows around a room. But in general, our brains automatically adjust for different light sources and make the color correction for us. We usually don't even notice.

Your camera's white balance control works like the human brain. It adjusts the exposure so your pictures have the same color cast no matter what light source you use. When properly balanced, your camera won't apply strange color casts to your pictures regardless of whether you shoot indoors, outdoors, in florescent lighting, or in candlelight.

Adjusting that White Balance

You've probably guessed that most of the time, your camera does just fine on its own. Most digital cameras have an "automatic white balance" setting that you've used since the day you bought your camera. If you have been disappointed with odd color casts and couldn't figure out why they have been there, though, you can get better results by switching to a white balance preset. Check your camera's manual for a guide to the white balance presets, and you'll probably find that you can fine-tune the camera to shoot in common situations like bright daylight, overcast sky, florescent lighting, and candlelight. If you like setting your white balance manually, be sure that you get in the habit of adjusting this control every time you shoot in different lighting conditions.

Fun With White Balance

Do you always need to use the proper white balance for a given situation? Did you always color inside the lines? Of course not! Here's where things get interesting. You'll find that you can get some very interesting effects by shooting the same scene with different white balance settings. For example, you could shoot a candlelit scene with your camera's automatic white balance setting and get a fairly straightforward image. Or you could shift the white balance toward red to create a warmer, more atmospheric effect.

I like the warmer colors that come from "misadjusting" the white balance. When the subject's face is a bit redder, for instance, I think the photo looks richer and more lifelike. Try adjusting the white balance in your own photos--it's a whole new way to be creative.

Dave's Favorites: PhotonShow

Want a great way to share digital images with your friends? IZotope has just released PhotonShow, a program I whole-heartedly recommend to anyone who wants to make digital slide shows for friends and family.

This $29 program lets you combine your digital images with a wide assortment of clever backgrounds and slide-show themes. Many of the themes are just window dressing for your slides, but others are animated. A cool 007 theme, for instance, makes your images part of what looks like the opening credits for a James Bond movie. Interactive puzzle themes let your images become part of playable sliding block and memory games. These themes transform what might otherwise be yet another vacation slide show into something truly fun and unique.

You can add voice narration and MP3 music to your show; the program also lets you tweak images with red-eye removal, color adjustment, rotation, and sharpening tools.

When you're done, you can play the completed slide shows from your PC or transfer them to a Pocket PC, load them onto a Web site, or burn them onto a CD. A $39 version of PhotonShow includes a subscription to upload slide shows to IZotope's Web server. Or, if you prefer, you can post them to your own Web site--IZotope provides directions on how to do that.

PhotonShow is a great program for sharing your digital images. It's so good, in fact, that it might energize you to take and share more pictures.

Q&A: Preventing Theft of Pictures on the Web

I am building a Web site, and I plan to include numerous images there. Some of these may be worth something (even if it's not a lot). I would like to disable the right-click, Save As feature in Web browsers. I realize that there is software out there that will get around this if someone is really keen on downloading the image, but I believe that this will stop the vast majority of users from downloading/saving the images. Can you tell me how to do this? Or are there better solutions available?

--Judit Zubovits, Ontario, Canada

You raise an interesting point, Judit. Yes, if you have some experience as a programmer, you can disable the option to save images in the right-click menu. Programmer friends tell me, though, that it's not really worth the effort. Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Opera all behave differently enough that it's difficult to create a Web site that disables all three successfully.

Even if you disabled image saves with the right-click menu, though, folks could simply capture a screen shot of your Web page with the Print Screen button on the keyboard and save your images that way. A determined thief could even piece together an image that's bigger than the screen without a whole lot of effort.

No, I don't think that programming is the key to your problem. Instead, you simply have to realize that any images you display on the Internet are vulnerable. As a consequence, you should post your photos in such a way that they're not particularly useful to anyone. I suggest that you add a copyright statement to the bottom of each image, for instance. More importantly, make sure that the pixel size of your images is too small to be reprinted or reposted elsewhere. When I upload pictures to the Web, for instance, I make sure that the largest dimension is about 400 pixels, making prints larger than about 2 inches pointless.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $10 and $100.

A gentle reminder, folks: We disqualify some really wonderful pictures every week because the submissions don't follow the rules. Be sure to include everything we ask for in your e-mail message, including a description of your picture and your complete contact information, or your entry is wasted!

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering please read the full description of the contest rules and regs.

This week's Hot Pic: "A Hair-Raising Experience," by Stacy Niedzwiecki, Rockford, Michigan

Stacy says, "We took our son, Alex, to Sesame Street Place in Pennsylvania. He absolutely loved the big pool filled with plastic balls. I like this shot because it really captured the moment of how fun it can be to just be a kid. I took this photo with my Olympus C-3040."

Hot Pic of the Month

Each month we choose one of our weekly winners to be the Hot Pic of the Month. For the month of July, we chose Maxine Snyder's "Path Less Traveled." Maxine apparently roams the streets of Wolcott, New York, on her lunch hour, looking for spots like this. Maxine has won a PC World CD-carrying case. As always, congratulations to all the other weekly winners. Keep up the good work!

We want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com.

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