Why Your Camera Changes Picture Colors
With a mind-boggling number of posts about weird colors in your photos, I provide a simple definition and photo tip to help ease your frustrations.
If you’ve experienced your camera changing colors and making your photos look weird, I know how frustrating that is. The good news is that the solution is often as close as a simple camera adjustment.
In every photo you take, your subject is illuminated by some kind of light, either natural or artificial. During certain times of the year, such as Christmas, this often creates the challenge of photographing Christmas tree lights and NOT getting weird colors.
Light has a temperature, and the temperature of the particular light source can affect how your camera captures the scene, whether perfectly or with weird colors. Depending on how your camera reacts to this light temperature in different environments, you can end up with unflattering results.
What's Going on When Your Camera Renders Weird Colors?
If you’re unfamiliar with the setting, your camera has a feature called White Balance. The camera makes adjustments, usually in the default Auto White Balance mode, according to its interpretation of the light’s temperature, to create results you’re happy with most often.
Sometimes, however, the camera cannot decipher the temperature accurately, and that's when you get those weird colors. The good news is that by adjusting the White Balance setting in your camera, you will most often solve the problem.
To find the white balance setting you may have a quick access on your camera body such as the button on the top left side of my camera body and the letters WB. Another option is to press the Menu button on your camera body, then highlight the camera icon to bring up the Shooting Menu. Within this menu look for the White Balance option as shown in the example below.
Within the White Balance setting, there are different options for you. Your camera may show you the adjustment as you go; if not, it may take some time to experiment until you find the best one. After choosing different options for improved results, you may still be unsatisfied, like I was with the results below.
White Balance Setting - Fluorescent.
Not quite.
White Balance Setting - Auto 2 warm colors. Nope.
White Balance Setting - Incandescent. No improvement.
White Balance Setting - Manual 10000K. Yikes.
What Else Can You Do if You're Not Satisfied?
I'd like to introduce you to Kelvin. Kelvin is a manual white balance setting that allows you to adjust the temperature setting. It may not be possible in all camera shooting modes, however. For example, it's unavailable in my camera’s automatic shooting mode. However, I can adjust it in the semi-auto modes of aperture priority, shutter speed priority, and manual camera mode. If a description of camera modes would be helpful please click here.
By continuing to scroll through the white balance options I anticipate that you'll arrive at an option for choosing the color temperature, like the example below.
Depending on your camera model, you can tweak the setting beyond choosing a color temperature. After highlighting 5000K and pressing the right arrow on the round toggle wheel on the back of my camera, I have additional fine-tuning options, as shown in the example below, if necessary.
How I Rendered a Satisfactory Exposure
After taking pictures using different white balance options (as seen above) and being unsatisfied, I utilized the manual Kelvin options. In the last example from the four images above, note the deep orange and a manual color temperature choice of 10000K, which was a profound flop.
What did work to my satisfaction and depicted the colors far more realistically is the 2500K manual temperature choice you see here. White Balance photo tip - remember to change your WB setting back to your usual setting, which I suspect is the Auto White Balance (AWB). Otherwise you'll experience the same type of issues you now know how to solve.
White Balance Setting - Manual 2500K. Realistic results.