White Balance and Color Temperature

Making white in the photo look like real white. The act of neutralizing the color of the light source.

Color temperature (K) has two faces

Physical color temperature

Black-body radiation: heat an object up and it emits red → orange → yellow → white → blue as it gets hotter.

So far so good: higher K = cooler (bluer) light.

🔴 Lightroom's slider runs the other way

Pulling Lightroom's Temperature slider to the right (higher K) makes the photo warmer.

The reason: the slider is the value you're declaring for the source light's temperature. When you tell Lightroom "this photo was lit at 6500K," it applies a warming correction to cancel out the blueness.

Actual light       Lightroom's correction      Result
─────────────      ──────────────────────      ───────
3000K (warm)    → slider 3000K → cool correction  → image looks neutral
5500K (neutral) → slider 5500K → almost no correction → image looks neutral
8000K (cool)    → slider 8000K → warm correction → image looks neutral

In short: physical K↑ = cooler light, slider K↑ = warmer result. That's the real reason it feels backwards.

Tint — the green ↔ magenta axis

Color temperature only covers the red↔blue axis. Real-world light isn't purely on that axis — fluorescents and LEDs introduce green casts, and twilight pulls magenta.

Tint = correction along the green-magenta axis. Slider left (green) ↔ right (magenta).

Common tint directions per source:

Tint is hard because it's harder to perceive a face leaning subtly green or magenta than it is to see a color shift on the warm-cool axis. Tricks:

• Anchor on shots that include a white sheet or wall.
• If skin looks yellow-green, push tint toward magenta.
• For mixed sun-and-shade photos, prioritize the face and accept the background drifts.

The trap of shooting AWB

Your workflow (AWB + RAW). Upside: you don't think about it at the shutter. Downsides:

• WB drifts subtly between consecutive frames. Even within the same scene, every shot can come out at a slightly different K.
• Strong-colored subjects pull AWB off. A dominant red outfit makes the camera think "the scene is too red" and shifts toward cyan, which makes the face look bluish.

Fix: pin WB on one shot in Lightroom and Sync to the rest of that scene's batch. Once per scene cluster.

Lightroom's WB picker (eyedropper)

Click on something in the image that should be neutral gray and Lightroom auto-balances. Good targets in portraits: the whites of eyes, gray shirts, gray pavement.

Click on a colored area (skin, leaves, clothing) and Lightroom will try to drive that color to gray, wrecking the whole image.

Related

• color-and-dynamic-range — Parent note
• hsl-and-color-mixer
• raw-vs-jpeg — Why RAW is so flexible for WB changes