If you have ever filmed a video indoors and wondered about the orange tint — that wasn't a camera error. That was an incorrect white balance. And it happens faster than you think.
What is behind it?
Light has a color. Daylight is bluish (approx. 5,600 Kelvin), incandescent light is orange (approx. 3,200 K), LED light is somewhere in between depending on the product. The human eye corrects this unconsciously — the brain knows that a white sheet of paper is white, regardless of the light. The camera does not know this. It captures the light exactly as it is.
White balance tells the camera: This here is white. Everything else adjusts accordingly. If the setting is incorrect, the entire image appears color-shifted — no matter how good the rest of the lighting setup was.
Automatic or manual?
AWB (Auto White Balance) works well — under stable lighting conditions. As soon as you mix multiple light sources or cut between indoors and outdoors, the automation starts to pump — the white balance jumps from setting to setting. This looks terrible in post-production.
My recommendation: set it manually. Hold a gray card, calibrate the camera, and you're done. Once done correctly, the shoot runs through without color stress.
Kelvin as a creative tool
And then there is the creative side: I can use the Kelvin value to deliberately set a mood. Warmer feels more cozy. Cooler feels more technical, modern, or detached. This is no longer error correction — this is image composition.
Best regards,
Sascha Manke