Understanding color temperature is one of the crucial rules of photography you must learn before you can begin to break them.
So what is color temperature? In short, each light source has its own individual color, or ‘color temperature’, which varies from red to blue.
Candles, sunsets and tungsten bulbs give off light that’s close to red (hence the ‘warm’ look they give to pictures), whereas clear blue skies give off a ‘cool’ blue light. It’s fairly obvious stuff once you read it.
Color temperature is typically recorded in kelvin, the unit of absolute temperature. Cool colours like blue and white generally have color temperatures over 7000K, while warmer colors like red and orange lie around the 2000K mark.
When you set your camera’s white balance manually (find out how to make a custom white balance setting) you can choose from a number of pre-set color temperature options like Tungsten, Daylight, Cloudy and Shade, or customize your own setting.
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