Astrophotography is a challenging yet rewarding genre of photography. To get the best results from every single click, you must understand the basics of white balance and its effects on your celestial object’s images. Actually, it is very easy to set your white balance. However, it can be difficult to understand why you must pick a particular option for your shooting.
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In this piece, we will discuss the best white balance for astrophotography and how to adjust it for optimal results. We will also provide some tips on how you can use different white balance settings for different objects in the night sky. At the end of reading this article, you will learn how to capture stunning night sky images with beautiful colors and clarity.
White balance is an important setting to consider when doing astrophotography because it can affect the color and clarity of your images. The white balance setting helps your digital camera to compensate for different types of lighting and produce true-to-life or accurate colors of your subjects. Producing colorful night sky and star images is a must in this genre. In fact, the importance of color in astrophotography cannot be over-emphasized.
Fortunately, there are several white balance settings to choose from when you want to start taking colorful photos of the night sky. The right one for you will depend on a few factors, such as the grade of your camera, the lighting conditions in your chosen location, and the objects you want to capture. Thus, we recommend you set your camera’s white balance to a setting choice that will accurately reflect the color of the stars or any objects you might be photographing.
To determine the correct white balance (WB), you must consider the color temperature of the light source illuminating the scene, that is, the degree of warmth or coolness of the light in your shooting location. This simply implies that your preferred shooting location and the sky conditions will automatically dictate what white balance setting option you should use.
Generally, the daylight (5200K) WB setting is the most suitable for astrophotography. But it is usually too warm for night sky images. Thus, cooler settings within the range of 3200-4800 are typically used by astrophotographers. However, it will depend on your location and environment.
For instance, if you are shooting the night sky in a light-polluted urban area, where excess ambient light reflecting off the atmosphere creates or adds a warm glow to the sky, we recommend you use a colder WB setting between 3,400 to 3,900. You may use settings of 4,000 or more if the sky is darker.
You may set your white balance to custom or auto if you are shooting the Astro objects in RAW file format. In fact, you don’t have to worry about white balance settings if you are recording the images RAW. This is because it can help you adjust the white balance in post-processing to the most suitable without reducing the quality of the photos. In contrast, you must select the correct white balance if you are shooting in JPEG.
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NB: We do not recommend shooting astrophotographs in JPEG. RAW image type is the most suitable format for this genre of photography.
In conclusion, the best white balance you should use for astrophotography will depend on your location, lighting situation, and a few other factors. Nonetheless, we recommend you shoot in RAW format with an “auto” white balance setting. If you must shoot in JPEG, we recommend you start with tungsten light (3200k) or daylight (5200k) and adjust accordingly. Finally, you should experiment with different WB settings to find out the best for your location and sky objects.