Auto white balance in phone cameras kills real color in wildfire photos
Sep 11, 2020
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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Massive wildfires are currently raging in the US West Coast. The skies have been colored orange and red, but you might not be able to accurately capture it with your phone camera. Many people have noticed that auto white balance on phone cameras is severely affecting orange and red hues. This makes this whole tragedy look way less dramatic and alarming than it is.
Some Twitter users shared photos and videos from Oregon and California that show what the skies really look like. I think that we can all agree how scary and devastating this is.
https://twitter.com/odie1kenodi/status/1303446101987676164
https://twitter.com/csochannel/status/1303499087971381248
This is nuts. Downtown Stayton at 12:22pm. Be safe, everyone. #KGW #Oregon #Fire #Smoke #LionsheadFire @KGWNews pic.twitter.com/ff4MKKU4qm
— Christine Pitawanich (@CPitawanichKGW) September 8, 2020
However, there are many people who noticed that something was off when they tried capturing the scene with their phone camera. Twitter user @teriarchibbles shared a few photos and wrote: “Fun fact. Had to take that picture with my Canon camera because my phone keeps auto color correcting it and doesn’t show just how gross outside it actually is.” The photo taken with her camera shows what it really looks like outside. In the photos taken with her phone, it looks like there’s a heavy storm or smog outside.
Welp Daly City looking apocalyptic today. pic.twitter.com/FTvtWDkvf7
— ✨Teri but Merry 🍤✨ (@teriarchibbles) September 9, 2020
Fun fact. Had to take that picture with my Canon camera because my phone keeps auto color correcting it and doesn’t show just how gross outside it actually is. pic.twitter.com/68uhYkwTW4
— ✨Teri but Merry 🍤✨ (@teriarchibbles) September 9, 2020
Enjoy some horror aesthetics from my work from home space today. pic.twitter.com/nVZTb8cqd2
— ✨Teri but Merry 🍤✨ (@teriarchibbles) September 10, 2020
Other Twitter users started responding with their own examples. I find this one the most striking because it truly shows the difference between color-corrected images and reality:
https://twitter.com/sleeplaboratory/status/1304065397650464769
Judging from some tweets I read, it looks like iPhone users have the biggest problem with color correction. When they wanted to snap accurate photos, they had to either use a “real camera,” or a third-party camera app like Halide that would disable iPhone’s auto white-balance. Here are a few more examples:
https://twitter.com/jachristian/status/1303707221415440384
Yep – had to download a separate camera app that allowed me to override the phone’s auto white balance. pic.twitter.com/EO9TyC0VCp
— Jennifer Leahy (@jm_leahy) September 9, 2020
Ok, used an app to turn off the iPhone color correction. Here’s what it really looks like out there in San Francisco, at 10 in the morning. (It’s getting darker) pic.twitter.com/v8TKcBH1t3
— Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier) September 9, 2020
Like Gizmodo’s Victoria Song notes, getting a good photo of the current apocalypse may end up being the least of our worries. However, you may need to get accurate photos if you work as a journalist, for example. Or you just want to document this devastating moment in history. Whatever the reason may be, I guess that it would be clever to use a third-party camera app if you want to really depict what it looks like out there at the moment.
[via Gizmodo]
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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4 responses to “Auto white balance in phone cameras kills real color in wildfire photos”
IMHO it just means the ‘White Balancing’ works as exoected
Samuel Mudrík It means that the auto white balance is not accurate.
Auto white balance does the best it can with the visual information it’s presented with. The sky isn’t normally orange, so it’s trying to compensate and show something close to (normal) reality.
Through the day, you may find yourself in places with very different lighting conditions: incandescent, florescent, sunlight, etc. If you kept your camera’s white balance set to one setting and took pictures of yourself in each lighting scenario, the pictures wouldn’t be consistent at all. The color of your skin tone would be all over the place. Auto white balance figures out conditions and adjusts so that you look the same in most all of the shots.
Gees, really??? As someone who has been evacuated last year and almost lost his house I say fuck you for using this to give fucking “photography tips” for your fucking likes. You’re nothing but an opportunistic cunt!!