Do you ever play with the white balance of a photo in post-processing? I never realized before that a simple change to the white balance can fundamentally change the feel of some images.
I am currently using Photoshop Elements and the white balance slider is something that I haven’t experimented with much when processing my RAW images. Normally my camera is set to automatic white balance, so I don’t worry too much about the temperature of the light being wrong. I was thinking a lot about light, however, when looking at an image of reflected moonlight that I shot last week. I shot it at ISO100, f20, and 20 seconds. According to my computer, the image as shot had a color temperature of 3950 Kelvin. Wondering what would happen I changed the temperature to something different, I moved the temperature to the shade setting of 7500 K.
Transformed moonlight
Suddenly my cool, moon-lit scene looks like a warm sunset. To give you an idea of the initial image, I went back to the RAW file and changed the color temperature to its original setting. The image is not exactly as it came out of the camera, because I made some other changes in Camera RAW, but you can see the big difference.
The second image is closer to what my eye saw, but in many ways I like the transformed image more. My unofficial resolution for the coming year may be to learn more about processing my photos (and there seems to be an awful lot to learn).
Moonlight
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved
Mike Powell 
I try to not play with white balance of a photo, but some times I use it because my point and shoot camera need some help to show the things how they really are.
Now that’s cool!
Interesting. Think I will look into white balance too.
I’m a naturally curious person, so when I see a setting I am likely to ask, “I wonder what happens if I push that button or move that slider…”
I have overabundance of curiosity, but tend to get uptight with something haven’t done before. Guess I should work on that.
There’s rarely a time I don’t tweak my white balance a bit. I usually leave my camera at the cloudy day setting unless I’m under intense yellow indoor lights. But adjusting the white balance is one of the key advantages to shooting in RAW in the first place, and it is the first, most effective method in my toolbox for setting an image’s mood just where I want it.
The white balance is a great tool to play with. Sometimes it is quite helpful to try to recreate the image that I remember. Though just as with every other adjustment a little is usually better. One trick I learned at a course was that if you want to replicate the sunset you saw, move the slider to 10,000.
Fine white-balance adjustment is one of the truly magic tools available to us. It can also provide a desperate rescue when you’ve set the camera for one mode, say, incandescent light, and then forget and shoot outdoors. It can be a life-saver. You can even scan slides or color negatives and retroactively correct–to some extent, at least–unfortunate temperature results.
Thanks for the info, Gary. My eye is still not fine-tuned enough to pick up some of the color casts, for example, that can be signs of a need to adjust white balance, but I’m starting to think about those things, which is probably a positive sign.
Yes, keep playing with your images. It opens us up to new ways of seeing the possibility in a composition.