White Balance in Landscape Photography - The Magic Number

White balance can be a tricky subject to understand and get right. In this first video of two parts I talk about what neutral is, and why you might not want your images to be neutral. I also give you a little tip for understanding what the light on the scene was really like!
Website: www.alexnail.com/​
Workshops: www.alexnail.com/workshops/
Workshop Mailing List: tinyurl.com/4m3y3syk​

[@justinrichardson3864]

Using the saturation slider to exaggerate the color cast is a great tip.

[@paulgoodey3478]

Great explanation on WB, I saw you on Daves video and you now have a new subscriber, I have learnt so much from Daves work and enjoy the mountain scenery, from an Englishman that has lived in Australia for 30 years, all the best . Paul Goodey.

[@LikeWeDidOutdoors]

Recently swallowed hard and revisited basics - always pays for me! I didn't realise that what I get stuck on is the colour separation. I tend to work it out in the end but now I know its face I feel more able - thanks very much!

[@rocketmanab]

What a fantastic video. So glad I found your channel (Thanks Dave Morrow!)

[@maximolange4409]

Haha same here! That talk between them was great.

[@roycrawford5270]

Very good and helpful Alex thanks.

[@bobmcdonald4834]

Thanks very much Alex. Nicely explained and really helpful 👍🙂

[@Eigil_Skovgaard]

Very good to see experience combined with theory.

[@robjopling1573]

Very helpful video Alex. Clearly explained. I'm looking forward to the next episode.

[@alexnail]

Glad you enjoyed it Rob!

[@harrynotaras2681]

I too found you through Dave Morrow. Excellent video Alex. Looking forward to watching the 2nd part.

[@GeorgeWheelhouse]

Brilliant video, with some great examples.

[@alexnail]

Thanks George

[@pepepersson5543]

So grateful for your editing videos. Really changed my approach to it. Big thanks :)

[@alexnail]

My pleasure, glad you found them helpful :)

[@howardrankin7119]

Clear and insightful advice, Magic indeed

[@alexnail]

No worries Howard :)

[@RichardEllaPhotography]

Another fantastic explanation Alex. I really appreciate all the insights you provide to critiquing and editing photos. Has made me think so much more about how I look at a photo.

[@alexnail]

Glad to here it Richard :)

[@MegaDwilkinson]

Wonderful instruction and advice - thank you

[@alexnail]

My pleasure David

[@orangeuavpilot7572]

Thank you Alex for sharing these important tips on white balance! I finally have a sustainable framework to operate from to begin my editing workflow.

[@alexnail]

Awesome to hear it!

[@NigelDownes-fi2pk]

Hi Alex, An excellent presentation, that was as sharp as your images! Good to see you back, and I'm looking forward to more of the same. Nigel

[@alexnail]

Thanks a lot Nigel

[@mikeswoods]

Nice one Alex .............. I have tried this and its good advice 📷👍

[@VangelisMatosMedina]

Wow, that was a really good video to common subject.

[@alexnail]

Glad you enjoyed it

[@SuperNashwanPower]

Wow. That helped me so much. I've always had trouble with white balance, but that's a straightforward simple way to deal with it. Well done and thanks, Alex!

[@alexnail]

Really glad you found it helpful :)

[@KeithMasonPhotography]

Thanks! Great video, very helpful.

[@alexnail]

Glad it was helpful Keith

[@tovertaal]

Nice video. One remark though: what we consider to be warmer colours (towards the red) are actually the lower colour temperatures, and vice versa. Blue is high temperature. It's a bit confusing, but important to know.

[@alexnail]

yes I agree, its probably something I should have clarified. At the same time on a colour temperature slider 3000K is blue and 6000K is orange. So it is easy to talk in these terms because 3000 kelvin is colder than 6000 Kelvin and also bluer, so for the most part this clarification isnt necessary and might even cause confusion.

[@JamesLanePhoto]

Really useful and well explained. Thanks Alex!

[@alexnail]

My pleasure James, not that you need much help in this respect it seems!

[@JamesLanePhoto]

@@alexnail Haha, thank you, however I have always struggled with snow scenes!

[@MikePageKaltenberg]

I usually don't play much with WB except for winter scenes and I haven't seen many videos on the subject. This was illuminating (see what I did there?) and real food for thought. Thanks.

[@alexnail]

I think you should have saved that pun for when I did a vlog on quality of light :P

[@KrushevT]

Amazing Stuff 👏

[@alexnail]

Thanks Krushev

[@tobiasschmidt6518]

Hey Alex, well explained! I‘ll keep these numbers in mind for my next landscape photo edits (whenever this will be). Thanks! Tobias

[@alexnail]

Awesome, glad it was helpful :)

[@suzannemullaney3205]

Excellent, I watched this twice.

[@alexnail]

I'll take that as a compliment rather than "It was unclear so I had to watch this twice" :P But seriously I'm glad you've found it helpful

[@suzannemullaney3205]

@@alexnail It was a compliment:)

[@ianlewisphotography]

So useful. I feel a little ashamed that after 18 years of photography this video has taught me so much 😂 Took some images at 5500k the other day and having the consistent output made the editing a lot easier. I have suffered in the past with AWB giving wacky results so understanding that 5500k will give me a good starting point in most situations is really useful. Thanks Alex 👍🏻

[@alexnail]

No worries Ian. It is indeed very helpful to properly understand this stuff!

[@ArefAlragehi]

Thanks for this video Alex. I have never thought of white balance like that even though i knew all the info you presented but just never structured it in my head as you did. I always found it strange that people complained about megnta/purple snow or blue snow while i see snow with those colors all the time as light interacts with it through the day

[@alexnail]

Yes it’s interesting how as your eye for colour develops you see colours that you didn’t before. Grey skies for example can vary wildly in their colour range!

[@colinmclean2523]

Very useful. Had white balance sorted on my D850, but the drone (Mavic Air2) was producing some interesting results and this trip back through first principle was very helpful.

[@alexnail]

Ah yeah, WB on drones is a bit of a nightmare!

[@colinmclean2523]

@@alexnail Yes - tendency to too much of everything, but getting a much more consistent WB now. Thanks.

[@garymaunder1399]

Very informative and useful video Alex......ditto Ian Lewis I'm afraid. Great channel by the way.

[@alexnail]

Thanks Gary, really glad you found it so helpful

[@JeffSinon]

Excellent information. I do find auto white balance on my X-Series cameras to be close to spot on 80-90% of the time. That remaining 10-20% though, well we just wont talk about that. Thanks for the info.

[@alexnail]

Yeah auto white balance often picks something fairly sensible. But for sunsets/blue hour it may counteract the natural colour cast to the light which might or might not be desirable, even if it looks Ok.

[@bobbylee4824]

Thanks Alex it was very helpful hope the all the family are well stay safe . Looking forward to the next one.

[@alexnail]

Yeah we’re all doing well thanks Bobby. I hope the same can be said for you too!

[@HerleyNicolau]

Hi Alex. I am really enjoying your videos, top quality in all aspects. I just would like to point a mistake about color temperature. Warm temperature actually is lower number on Kelvin scale. Like candle light is around 1800k. And cold color has higher number on Kelvin scale, like Blue hour is around 7000k. Please, check on 4"53' of the video.

[@alexnail]

Ah that’s annoying - I just misspoke! Oh well, hopefully others will spot that in accuracy like you and not get confused

[@DaveMorrow]

Good stuff, Alex!

[@alexnail]

Ah cheers Dave! Must check out your channel again, haven't been there in a while!

[@DaveMorrow]

@@alexnail Anytime Alex. It's all good man. Better to be out shooting to tell you the truth:)

[@alexnail]

@@DaveMorrow ha yeah except in the UK all travel is essentially banned and I love a long way from any vaguely open ground, never mind mountains!

[@DaveMorrow]

@@alexnail that's horrible. I feel for ya. We aren't locked down that much here in Washington State. Can still get out to the mountains. Otherwise I'd be going insane. I guess it's a good time to make a lot of videos & edit photos!

[@alexnail]

Yeah but it just sucks being on my own all the time - hard to be as productive. Probably another full month to 6 weeks to go before we can see people again and travel!

[@joelwolski]

Billions of videos on KZbin and I've finally found something worth watching. This is my third of your videos and now I know what I'm going to be doing for the rest of the weekend. Just to be clear, when you talk about setting the WB to 5500, are you referring to in camera when you shot or adjusting it to that when editing?

[@alexnail]

Thanks Joel. Whether you do it in camera is up to you. I like to use the cloudy white balance (which is 5400K - close enough). The only benefit if setting it in camera is you prevent auto white balance issues and see the “true” colour of the light (relative to daylight!) whilst you are in the field. But there is no other reason.

[@michaelkhalsa]

A couple points to add to your excellent video. First is to understand the color cast each lens adds. For example Samyang lenses give a much different bias voightlander, as well as the particular camera. After getting the overall white balance correct or pleasing, I then sometimes adjust the white balance separately for a portion of the image or for shadows. I am using a sony a7r2, while a great camera in many ways, the color balance is not in the league of say the a1, but if we understand the nuances, then we can correct for some of the difference. While I only currently have one voightlander lens, I really like the starting point it gives with the colors. Our eyes also develop biases. For example many people, such as my wife, get use to the warmer and oversaturated color of Samsung phones, while others prefer the apple more natural look. Or the Canon warmer look, vs the sony cooler look. I often find that it helps to come back to a landscape shoot several days later and check the colors again. Also sometimes the jpg thumbnails that C1 or lightroom make can exagerate or quickly show mistakes in adjustments.

[@alexnail]

The lens point is a good one, and not one that occurred to me having used exclusively Canon lenses. I think there is good consistency with most modern lenses, but you are right to point this out. Certainly there are areas of the image that you might want to correct independently, whether through WB or direct colour manipulation. I will warm shadows if an entire foreground is in shadow and it doesn’t really tie together with a sky for example. But most of the time I want to maintain any local ‘casts’ and just desaturate them a little from time to time. Personal bias is something that would be hard to cover. I think trying to treat the subject with a degree of objectivity at least gives a good starting point. I notice that through whatever method, many top photographers have a strong understanding of white balance which means they are more or less doing what I suggest here, whether or not they think about it in quite the same way! Thanks for the comment!

[@alexshdvideo]

Solid video. Thanks for uploading. Having spent the last 20 years in video, I usually work with either 3200k or 5600k lights,, so when outside I typically shoot 5600k camera settings.. (different cameras 5600k are different). The only timeI would really manually white balance off a card is if I was shooting a narrative where I wanted takes match each other hour to hour and day to day so it looks as its all shot at the same moment. Auto white balance only for live sports when the sun is moving from afternoon to evening/sunset with light field lights coming on. My question is. You choose 5500? Not 5600 to match any workflow studio lighting.. Some cameras think or people say white balance for 5200.. I think my Nikon is 5260 for instance. How does 5500 differ for you compared to 5600/5200? Your camera maybe in the shadow areas during post? Anyway for anyone following along... If your doing narrative (with people for instance) manually white balance with card so hour by hour, day by day, or even months apart you can string the images or video together to sell the narrative that it’s all shot at the same time. For those doing landscapes etc, pick a setting in camera 5200-5600 depending upon your camera/workflow/experience... that way you can capture that. “Thing” that your real life eye see’s. AWB or grey card Manually white balance at sunset destroys the sunset as extreme example. Finally shoot RAW!!!!! So important.. Gives so much latitude and Adobe Photoshop is only $10 a month, and there are other apps out there that are single payment of reasonable money.. (other programs have limited plug in support.. only reason I keep Adobe around). Video is harder..10 bit over 8 bit.. and RAW, Red, RAW, Prores RAW or BRAW over 10 bit prores. 8 bit video camera you say? Set to daylight or one of the 5200-5600 depending upon camera, pick neutral low contrast setting.. Sometimes built in LOG is fine... but remember 8 bit can’t be pushed far.. expose to right , but retain highlights, push down in post and bump up saturation. In digital stills RAW is better and so you don’t need to shoot LOG of any form, so no need to bump up contrast and saturation in every shot.... RAW in a still camera is far superior than any compressed RAW in any video camera.. Well I haven’t played with Arri in 20 years... too $$$ for me.. though I would switch to Arri if I could. Oh and EVERYONE should get those $100 X Rite Color Checker Passport Photo/video. Head out in the morning... or late afternoon... shoot a pic of the color chart and grey card so you know what color is supposed to be... but with camera at 5200 or 5600 etc. shoot raw.. and you can always match and adjust colors if you NEED to to come to a normal morning/noon/afternoon... lighting vs Dawn/Sunset or Golden hour light where you really want to be be set to manual to record the wonderful light that attracted you. :)

[@alexnail]

I’m not sure why a landscape photographer would choose a WB to match a studio workflow to be honest. 5500k is about the WB of many film stocks, it’s what we are used to seeing. 5600 is very similar though, just fractionally warmer, the difference is pretty small for landscape. 5200 will look cold/blue in most scenarios, you might choose that kind of WB to get better colour separation if there is a strong warm cast though (sunset etc) Most cameras do have very consistent WB when it comes to temperature, but not all for sure. 8-bit video can be pushed pretty far without falling apart, just not with the lower bitrates that many cameras offer. Exposing to the right in log can cause Ollie issues that are extremely hard to recover depending on the camera and log curve, this is particularly true at lower bitrates. Landscape photographers really don’t need colour checkers, they just need a sound understanding of the impacts of white balance changes both in terms of realism and creativity. If a colour checker can aid in that then great, but they are expensive for what they would offer most people I think.

[@jessejayphotography]

Fantastic explanation of your process. I'm curious if you take the same approach with your video shooting? Sometimes I feel like in video we try to hard to get proper white balance and achieve true white and then...we just apply grades that mimic and then exaggerate the conditions we saw with our eyes (minus skin tones of course).

[@alexnail]

Yes, I do the same with video because I want the video to show what the photos are going to look like. But if I was going to do a creative grade I would of course try to correct the white balance to reveal the colour of the subjects etc

[@steveforden]

Very helpful video Alex - just to clarify, the c5500 temperature ought to be fairly universal across cameras, whereas the tint is more camera specific? I think somewhere around 20 on my Fuji tends to look fairly natural, which I seem to recall us discussing on Skype a few months back.

[@alexnail]

I think that our eyes are particularly sensitive to tint too. You’ll find in a lot of cases where there is fairly little difference between say 5400K and 5600K but if it’s a little bit green or magenta it really jumps out (or at least it does for me!)

[@danmar94]

Nice vid Al, unsure about vlogging in your pyjamas though!

[@alexnail]

Ha, I’ve never been one for fashion!

[@danmar94]

@@alexnail Nor me really, but I had to get one in there for the week of abuse in Iceland about my green coat!

[@jesusroncero]

@@danmar94 lol

[@stevemoore-vale5632]

Great video with superb information. Really enjoyed it. What sort of impact does the white point of your monitor have on all of this? I calibrate mine to D65 (6500k)

[@alexnail]

Monitor white balance certainly plays a role. I use D65 because I find that looks ‘neutral’ to me although many people would argue for other white points. In theory though your eyes should adjust to different monitor white points so that they don’t look yellow or blue so any affect should be fairly small. One thing I would say is that D65 is if anything, on the cold/blue side of your potential choices so if there was an impact in your case or mine then it might be in choose white balances that are fractionally too warm. However I actually find my own white balance choices tend to be colder than many other people I’ve run 1-to-1s with (for example they tend to choose overly warm skies) so I’d be inclined to think that in my case at least D65 is the right choice, particularly since I can get excellent print colour accuracy.

[@stevemoore-vale5632]

@@alexnail Thank you for the detailed response. Like you say, the difference is marginal and our eyes will adjust. I do find I tend to over warm photos but I think by using your advice of setting 5500 in most situations other than sunrise/set or creative use, is the right one. Thanks again.

[@HoriaBogdan3]

Really nice and educational video. For me - a partially colorblind person - this one is particularly interesting and useful, because playing around with tint (especially) for me is a big NO-NO :) You wouldn't happen to know the "magic numbers" for Sony A7mk3, would you?

[@alexnail]

Well I actually noticed after the video that the first snow image was actually shot on an A7RII (+5 magenta). I suspect true neutral will be around there or closer to zero, but it’s definitely true that it is better to be on the magenta side than the green side! If you really want to figure out where neutral is then go out at midday on an overcast day and take a photo outdoors of a sheet of printer paper. Then try the white balance dropper on that white balance target. The temperature slider may be a bit off depending on how blue the light happens to be an the characteristics of the paper, but the magenta should be extremely close!

[@HoriaBogdan3]

@@alexnail Thanks for that :)

[@amadej.mocnik]

i have a nikon z 7 ii, can you give any tip on how to figure out the neutral tint value? Very educational video on white balance have to say.

[@alexnail]

It varies from camera to camera, but if you take a photo on a cloudy day of something neutral in colour (grey/white) then take a WB off that it should give you your neutral tint within 1 or 2 - you’ll get a feel for it after that. What you definitely don’t want to do is do that process in any sort of coloured light, it needs to be neutral daylight really.

[@seamydobbsno1]

Hi Alex, you seem well versed in the technical aspects of photography, especially reproducing natural true to life colours. Was there a source that you used personally to educate yourself on colour theory etc?

[@alexnail]

No, I’m afraid not, I was an engineer originally and I’ve always found this sort of thing came naturally, so really it’s just observation/trying to figure out what is going on!

[@RewDowns]

I tend to be around -11 tint with my canon eos r (Adobe Color profile)

[@alexnail]

I previously owned an EOS R and that doesn’t sound quite right to me (unless you have some unusual glass/filters that are causing a cast)

[@RewDowns]

@@alexnail actually you're right, I had some changes in the HSL that were throwing it off, thanks for helping me catch that!

[@robtraverssmith]

Thanks for an NB tut. How does one set up the temp (5 500) & hue (+5 for Nikon D850) as default settings you suggest in LrC?

[@alexnail]

Ooh that’s a good question! Actually it’s a really useful thing to be able to do....I create a preset which has a few other settings as part of it (correct chromatic aberration for example). Once that preset is created you can then set it as an import preset. I might do a quick video on that

[@robtraverssmith]

@@alexnail - great. Will watch out for your video. Thanks!

[@boabrahamsen9442]

Do you set 5500 at shooting to or is it your processing default in Lightroom sorry.

[@alexnail]

I do both. On the camera it can be nice just so that I can see *roughly* what the image looks like in terms of colour from the cameras more objective perspective. There is no other benefit to this though.