A Quick, Easy Note About RAW Format and White Balance

Hi all!  I took some photos of my son shaving in the bathroom yesterday.  My camera was set to "Auto White Balance".  Most cameras do a pretty good job of selecting a white balance, but they aren't always correct.  An incorrect white balance will throw all the colors off in the entire photo.

If I was using JPEG format, the processing would have been done by the camera and the photo would have been difficult to correct.  I probably could have fixed it in Photoshop, but it would have taken awhile.

In RAW format, your camera will save ALL the data at the time, allowing you to do the processing on your own.  It will display what it interprets to be correct, but if it isn't, the camera has also recorded other information.  (I hope I'm kinda explaining this correctly.  It's really technical and hard to simplify, lol).  This makes color corrections a snap.

Anyway, here's my example:

This is how the camera interpreted the white balance.  You can see the yellowish skin tone my son has due to an incorrect white balance.

Thankfully, I took this photo in RAW format.  This is how easy it was to fix.

This is a screenshot of me fixing the photo.  The software is Digital Photo Professional (DPP).  This is the software that was included with my camera.  It allows a lot of adjustments in RAW that aren't available in JPEG.

It's really small here, but if you see the black circle, it says "White balance adjustment" with a little dropper looking button.  That dropper will let you select a white sample in the photo.  The cleanest, purest white (in my opinion) was the spot I circled.  The software then used that white as the white balance and adjusted all other colors accordingly.

Here's the result of fixing the white balance.  No other adjustments were made to the photo:

This is just a quick example of the benefits of RAW format and also an example of how important white balance can be.