Yeah, I said it! Auto White balance has the potential to give you terrible results. If you’re a JPG shooter, you should seriously consider taking control of your WB. Set it to Daylight WB for most shooting and you’ll be happier with your results.

White Balance is all about rendering the proper color of what you’re shooting. Light comes in different colors; Dayight, Tungsten, Fluorescent, etc. The light may be neutral, more yellow or more green. Changing your white balance to match the light gives you truer color rendition.

Auto WB ‘guesses’ at the best setting and can be misled by an overabundance of a certain color in your photo. Shooting a sunset on Auto can result in the camera overreacting to all that beautiful warm light and adding a lot of blue to the picture. That’s why many cameras have a Sunset Scene Mode.

Get off of Auto WB, use the presets instead. Try shooting the same daylight scene using Auto and Daylight WB and see what your results are. Shoot a photo with a lot of one color and see how Auto overcompensates. You may never use Auto WB again.

** RAW shooters may use Auto WB and just change every picture later in post processing. I’m big on shooting it right the first time so I don’t have to spend the weekend processing and correcting images. To each his own.