White balance is the process of colour correcting, or removing unrealistic colour casts, so white will be rendered white. Your camera has to take in to account the colour temperature of the light source in your scene.
It controls the colour balance of your images by adding red or blue light to balance out the light in the picture, making it warmer or cooler depending on the atmosphere you’re trying to create.
White balance settings in correlation with colour temperature
For example, if you took a photo in the shade or on a cloudy day (natural blue light), you would set the white balance setting to “Shade” or “Cloudy” respectively, the camera would add red light, balancing out the colour and rendering the final image white, like in the cloudy example photo below.
Likewise, if you took a picture under an incandescent light bulb (red/tungsten light), you would set the white balance setting to “Tungsten” and the camera would add blue light to balance out the light, making it look like you took the picture in natural daylight.
Occasionally, the photographer might purposefully mess with the white balance to change the atmosphere, adding red light to create warmth or blue to create coolness.
For an example, I took a photo of the same scene in all six different white balance settings (scroll over to see which ones). The tungsten setting has added too much blue light so that the building looks blue. Shade has added too much red light and makes the picture look too warm. Out of all six pictures, the daylight setting has rendered the most natural looking image. That’s because the colour temperature when I took them would have been roughly 5000-6000K (degrees of Kelvin), the temperature of natural daylight.
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