Welcome back. It's Karen from the photography playground. In the previous lecture, we talked about the exposure of the image, but the colors in the photo are also very important. Now you've probably seen from time to time a photo that has a color cost, it looks too yellow for instance, this means that the white balance is off. So today I want to explain to you about white balance, usually a topic full of confusion and I hope I can clear things up for you. To explain to you about white balance, I first need to tell you something about color temperature.
Every light source has its own color temperature. For instance, the color temperature of candlelight is different from the color temperature of a flashlight. And our biggest light source of all the sun has different color temperatures depending on the time of day and the weather conditions. The color temperature early in the morning is different from the color temperature during the day. We described color temperature of Light Bulb being warm yellow light or cool blue light. The light a candle produces is warm and yellow the light the sun produces during the days called and blue.
It is measured by degrees Kelvin. Let me show you. The color temperature at 10,000 Kelvin is very blue. At 8000 it starts to become more natural. There's a mix between the blue and the yellow 5600 is the middle ground the mix between blue and yellow produces a neutral color. At 4000 Kelvin it becomes more yellow, and 2000 is even more yellow.
Candlelight has a color temperature of thousand Kelvin and a clear blue sky of 10,000 Kelvin. average day light produces a color temperature around 5600 which is the most neutral light. Now there's no need to learn this by hand. Hey, I don't even notice by what I'm showing you this because I hope it will give you an understanding of the different color temperatures. Because you're not aware of them, the light basically looks the same to you. And you're not alone.
It looks the same to me to our eyes don't see the difference between the colors of the light because our brain compensates for all those different color temperatures. In order for us to see the proper and natural colors of our surroundings, we have a teeny tiny bit. So in our brain, mixing the colors so we see why does white, blue is blue and pink is pink, wonderful is that a camera doesn't have that, at least not one that's functioning in a perfect way our brain works. You could say that when it comes to correcting color temperature, the camera's brain is its white balance. If a scene is still yellow, it will add a little blue to create a neutral color temperature. And if it's too blue, it will add a little yellow.
But obviously you have to tell the camera what to do. There are a number of ways to do that. And I will come back to that in the next module when we work with the camera app. But apart from the whiteboard And setting another factor comes into play. And I want to address that now. In the next lecture, we'll be talking about file formats and why you should be shooting in the raw file format.
One of the major reasons to start doing that is that when you should enroll, you can correct the white balance for the full spectrum afterwards in the post processing phase. So if your photo has a nasty yellow color, cause you can correct it afterwards, instead of correcting it in camera. And that's very good news, my friends, because when you're photographing, you have more important things to do is not getting your exposure, right. So shooting enroll is the topic of the next lecture. See you in there and Until then, happy photographing.