January 2025, Image Temperature

News about happenings at Deliberate Light and photography instruction (see Digital Photo Academy). My views on this month’s photography topic: Image Temperature. To get these newsletters by email a month before they are posted here, go to the DeliberateLight.com website and click on Newsletter Signup.

NEWS

Upcoming Workshops. I am scheduled to teach workshops for Digital Photo Academy on March 1st at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. You can sign up here if interested.

· Mastering Your Camera Controls (1.5 hours) – intended for DSLR/Mirrorless/Compact cameras (smartphone tutorial available separately)

· Composition in the Field (3 hours) – walking tour around the venue with instruction and hands-on practice composing photos (bring any camera)

New Photo.

The Gingko Lets Down Her Skirts. A friend contacted me to let me know that the gingko tree at Thunderbird Lodge had dropped its leaves. I arrived to find this enchanting golden carpet over the entire area around the tree. I do not know how old the tree is or who planted it, but judging by its size it is many decades old. One can not only delight in the beauty of its fallen foliage but also stand in awe that gingko trees are living fossils that have been around since the Jurassic.

(Rose Valley, PA, 2024)

For a more detailed, enlarged view and to get it printed, see it on my website.

VIEWS

Image Temperature. It happens to everybody who takes pictures with cameras. That brilliant sky just post-sunset looks pale and washed out in your photo. Or, you take a photo in a workshop and everything looks faintly green. Or, like the image below, a low-light indoor shot looks almost luridly yellow.

What gives? Your camera is doing its best to figure out how to “white balance” the image, and sometimes it is not ideal. White balancing in photography means adjusting the overall color cast of the entire image to make things that should be white look white. In the above photo, because I was there, I know that the walls are painted white, well, actually just a little off-white. They are not even close. The camera, in taking this photo, decided that the lamp on the left should be white, and adjusted the color cast of the entire image accordingly making everything else yellower. This is very common in shooting indoors with incandescent lighting or with warm LED lights.

In many cameras and some photo editing apps, white balancing adjusts according to the colors of different kinds of light conditions: ranging from the golden glow of sunrise and sunset to the bluish color in dark skies (e.g., heavy cloud cover or evening after sunset). This yellow-blue continuum is called “temperature”, the idea being that yellow is a warm color and blue is a cool color. And, of course, artificial lighting, ranging from candle to incandescent to fluorescent to LED also vary on this dimension as well.

So, as in the above image, when your camera does not do a great job with temperature, what can you do? Fortunately, most photo editing apps (for example, Android Photos, Apple Photos, Snapseed, or Lightroom), allow you to adjust temperature in an image directly. Shown below: first, just to demonstrate, I adjusted temperature to be too “cool” and, second, I adjusted so the off-white walls look about what they actually looked like to my eye at the time of the photo.

Too “cool”

Natural look.

Notice that this last photo is still a bit on the warm side – reflecting the lighting at the time. In the image below, I take the temperature adjustment so that the walls look as white as they do during daytime. It depends on the impression you are going for, but to me, this looks a little less inviting.

A few considerations:

– Many cameras (not the iPhone Camera app, I believe) allow you to adjust temperature directly before taking the picture. When I have time in shooting, I try to do this adjustment so that the recorded image matches the temperature as I perceive it in the scene at that moment. If I do not, then later editing adjustments must rely on my memory of the temperature, which, well,… or, let’s say, I indulge in artistic expression…

– Technically, there is another dimension to white balancing, often called “tint”, which is a green-red continuum. Some fluorescent lighting, for example, can cast a greenish hue that can be adjusted away as necessary.

– There is a lot more to the subject of white balance than this, including presets, auto settings, lighting, color calibration, etc., but I find that adjusting by eye in-camera or in post works fine a lot of the time.

Carl Finkbeiner

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