Why do my photos come out orange or blue?

Different light sources are genuinely different colours. Your brain silently corrects for it, which is why a room lit by a filament bulb looks white to you and comes out orange in a photograph. The camera has to be told, or it guesses.

Step by step

1. Recognise the cast.Warm orange means the camera was set for daylight and the light was tungsten or warm LED. Cold blue means the camera was set for daylight and the subject was in open shade under a blue sky. Green means fluorescent tubes, or a room lit through foliage.
2. Set the white balance to match the light.Use the preset for the actual source — daylight, cloudy, shade, tungsten, fluorescent — rather than automatic. Presets are consistent between shots, which automatic is not, and consistency is what makes a set of photographs match.
3. Understand the scale.White balance is expressed as a colour temperature in kelvin. Low numbers describe orange light, high numbers describe blue light, and the camera setting applies the opposite correction. Setting a low number when the light is actually blue makes the photograph bluer still, which is the usual confusion.
4. Use a grey reference for accuracy.Photograph a grey card or a sheet of white paper in the light you are shooting in, then use it to set a custom white balance or to click a neutral point in editing. This is the only genuinely accurate method and it takes ten seconds.
5. Deal with mixed light by removing one source.A room with daylight through a window and warm bulbs overhead has two different colours of light in one frame. No single correction fixes both. Switch the bulbs off and use the window, or close the curtains and use the bulbs.
6. Shoot RAW when colour matters.White balance in a RAW file is a stored instruction rather than a baked-in change, so it can be set correctly afterwards with no loss at all. In a JPEG the correction is applied to the pixels and undoing it degrades them.
7. Decide when a cast is wanted.Accurate is not always right. Warm light at sunset should look warm; correcting it to neutral removes the reason for the photograph. Correct casts that misrepresent the subject, keep the ones that describe the moment.
8. Check skin tones last.People are the reference everyone judges by. If skin looks right and the rest is slightly off, the picture reads as correct. If skin is green or magenta, nothing else saves it.

Tips

• Photograph a white sheet of paper at the start of a set. It gives you a neutral reference for the whole batch in editing.
• Cheap LED bulbs often have poor colour rendering, so skin can look sallow no matter what white balance you set. Window light avoids the problem entirely.
• Auto white balance is at its worst when one colour dominates the frame — a red jumper, a green lawn, an orange wall.

Common mistakes

• Leaving white balance on automatic for a set of photographs — It re-decides on each frame based on what is in it, so a series of shots in identical light comes out in slightly different colours and will not match when placed together.
• Correcting a warm sunset to neutral — The warmth is the subject. Automatic correction on a golden hour scene routinely produces a flat grey photograph of something that was beautiful.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask