Camera White Balance Settings

[SiClews]

Hi, I'm new to photography and brought a Fujifilm FinePix S5500 as it was cheap and all I could afford. The white balance settings are Auto, custom, daylight, shade, daylight lamps, warm white lamps, cool white lamps and incandescent light (the icon is a light bulb). In a magazine I brought it gives a table for white balance settings with daylight, tungsten, flourescent, cloudy and shade. Could anyone please advice me as to which settings I should use in particular when it says tungsten and flourescent? I'm thinking tungsten would be daylight lamp and and flourescent would be warm white lamp.

Thanks

[Colin Southern]

Hi SiClews,

Any chance of a first name to call you by?

Use tungsten if your scene is illuminated by tungsten filament light bulbs (the traditional bulbs that have the small wire filament inside them) - they're quite "yellow" in colour. Use Flourescent when shooting under "cool" flourencent lights (including compact flourescent lights) (these give off a slightly blue "cool" colour) (ie those small modern energy-efficient replacement light bulbs).

Does you camera have a custom white balance option?

[SiClews]

Hi Colin,

First name is Simon.

Yes my camera does have a custom white balance option. The camera doesn't have a tungsten option or a fluorescent one. It has 3 options for fluorescent 1 is "Daylight" 2 is "Warm White" and 3 is "Cool White" and a light bulb icon for incandescent light plus a cloud icon for shade and the sun for daylight.

From your reply I'm assuming any photo's I take indoors at home (we have the energy saving light bulbs) with the light on should be option 3 for cool light.

Maybe easier to stick to daylight photo's outside where it's either shade or daylight! Or, spend the time to set the custom white balance everytime!

Thanks
Simn

[revi]

Hi Colin,
<...>
Maybe easier to stick to daylight photo's outside where it's either shade or daylight! Or, spend the time to set the custom white balance everytime!

Or just try a few settings at a quiet moment: you'll see straigh away if the WB setting you picked works: if it's very wrong, your pictures will have a strong colour cast. Normally, the WB setting is saved in the EXIF metadata, so you can check which one worked in a given situation afterwards as well (and after a while you'll be able to guess right most of the time )

[Colin Southern]

From your reply I'm assuming any photo's I take indoors at home (we have the energy saving light bulbs) with the light on should be option 3 for cool light.

Yes - that's probably your best preset.

Maybe easier to stick to daylight photo's outside where it's either shade or daylight! Or, spend the time to set the custom white balance everytime!

Usually it's easiest to just include a greycard in one of the shots, and then adjust the white balance in post-processing afterwards (depending on what software you're using). With Photoshop you can correct several hundred shots with just a few mouse clicks.