I have long understood the reason for having an accurate white balance in digital photography. For the JPEG shooter, correct white balance at capture is critical because it becomes embedded in the image file as it is written to your storage card. If you have an incorrect white balance set in your camera (say your camera was set to Tungsten and you were shooting Daylight) and are shooting JPEGs, you are going to cause a lot of data shifting when you try to correct the problem in software and that means lots of image degradation. 

 

With the advent of powerful software like Adobe® Lightroom®, RAW shooting became easier and quicker to deal with, so having a custom white balance wasn’t important anymore – right? Well, it turns out that there are advantages to having a custom white balance even in a RAW workflow.

 

First, having a custom white balance set at capture can save time when processing files later on. Since most Raw conversion utilities assign whatever white balance was set in the camera at the time of capture, you won’t have to locate a target reference photo to white balance off of. The second advantage has to do the your camera’s LCD screen. Even when shooting Raw, the image preview on the back of your camera is a small JPEG that has been processed from your RAW capture. This file uses whatever white balance is currently set in the camera to build its image preview. If you have a correct custom white balance set before you start shooting, the previews on your camera will be more accurate. 

 

 

 

Please Log In or Sign Up for a FREE Silver Account to access the rest of this article or others on ProPhotoResource.com