The Camera - White Balance

 Why do your pictures look so yellow?

In photography, and in the real world, light has temperatures, and these temperatures affect how the image turns out. Warmer light appears more yellow on cameras, while cooler light appears bluer. Cameras have no real clue what "white" is, the sensors only measure RGB values, and white is just the highest possible light level. So when you are in a setting with an especially yellow light, your camera does not know it is white, just that this color has some green and red values in them. To fix this issue, modern cameras have a white balance option, which allows the user to tell the camera which color is actually white, and from there the camera will balance everything else accordingly. For almost all cameras, this is done by taking a picture of a pure white surface, going into the White Balance setting, and selecting the picture that was just taken.
This first example is a photo I took of my living room with a normal properly leveled white balance.
The second example is the same picture, but before taking I changed the white balance so a light blue sheet was used as white balance.
Much like the final example, it is the same picture but using a light yellow sheet for the white balance.

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