D600 White Balance Settings

Today I decided to test the typical *indoor* white balance settings on the Nikon D600. White balance is the digital camera control to remove unwanted color casts from your photo’s. This is done to render your scene as close to the proper color as you can. Keeping in mind that all digital camera’s pull a scene toward 18% grey. Usually your camera will have seven different white balance settings to choose from, not including any manual adjustments. Today, I will look at four of the white balance settings that you might choose to use while shooting an indoor scene.

Note: No Flash was used. Natural light from an east facing window. WB settings tested were Auto, Incandescent, Fluorescent, and Sunlight.

Auto – The setting most DSLR users leave their camera’s set to.

Incandescent – This setting cools down the photo. Used mostly to shoot indoors. Also known as Tungsten.

Fluorescent – This will compensate for cool lighting and warm up your shot.

Sunlight/daylight – This is known as “normal” It is ment to mimic the noon sunlight.

As you can see from the photo’s below. The Auto settings gives us a basic neutral WB. Quite usable, and very good, it did add some yellow to the scene, if ever so slightly. The Incandescent (Tungsten) setting rendered the photo blue. This is expected as our light source was natural light from a window. The Fluorescent setting warmed our photo. It gives us a slight purple tone to the scene. Again, this is expected due to the light source. The sunlight/daylight setting rendered the scene again neutral. As it looked under the lighting conditions.

As you can see the D600 is spot on with it’s WB settings. Choosing the correct WB is a critical part of the process. However, as you can see Auto renders the scene quite close to what it should be. If you don’t know which WB setting to choose. Auto will not fail here.