White Balance Setting

What is white balance? What is the function of white balance? Why do we need to know how to use white balance in our digital camera?
Yaa .. Such questions always arise minds of digital camera owners in general.
Before I explain what it is about white balance in digital cameras, I wanted to ask, did you ever take a photograph of a person but the result is the color of his skin was not natural? pale, or even look yellowish?
If the answer is yes, or even you often run into things like this when taking photos, then the thing to note is the white balance setting on your digital camera.

White balance is one aspect of digital photography that will affect the results of our photos. But in general, most of us digital camera users never take into account the white balance setting, we are just happy to even always use auto white balance settings.



So in essence setting the white balance is needed to get the colors as accurately as possible (true color) on the results of our photos.

Okay, more details like this:
White balance I interpret as the camera's ability to read / translate the white color based on existing light sources. The white color that is read by the camera will affect other colors.
Why is the light source affects the camera's ability in reading the color white?
Because each light source has a different temperature so that it can affect the camera in white color reading, for example:
Light from fluorescent light sources will produce a bluish color (cool color) in our picture, while the light source of incandescent lamps / bulbs produce images kemerah-merahan/kekuning-kuningan (warm color) on the results of our photos.

So, we should be setting the white balance on our camera at any time, depending on the source of light we see when we take photos, because the camera is different from our eyes by naked eye that can read the white on the light source is different.

Illustration photo:
The picture below I took in the room with the light source and using fluorescent light dominated setting AUTO WHITE BALANCE (AWB)