Automatic white balance is one of those things that you don’t tend to think about when you’re out taking photos, but it can be used for creative, as well as practical, purposes. You probably already know that colour temperature is a range on the Kelvin scale, centred on 5600K, which is the colour of sunlight at midday. When it gets cloudy or you’re in the shade, the colour temperature rises to 7,000-10,000K, which gives everything a blue colour cast.
Logically, it’s weird because you’d expect higher numbers to give warmer colours, but it’s the opposite. Conversely, at sunset and sunrise, you have a lower colour temperature in the range of 2,500-2,800K, which gives a reddish colour cast. So now we come to camera white balance settings. These are designed to…
