Color temperatures

When you take photos it can be very useful to know about the different color temperatures and their defaults. Have you ever been curious about why your camera has an option for setting different lightning levels. The temperature color unit is Kalvin.

Setting	Color temperature
A sunny day outside	5200K
A cloudy day outside	6500K
Fluorescent	4200K

For more information is found on Wikipedia.

An example

To give an example of how this can be applied to practical photography look at the images below. The first image is a Canon 20D RAW image only converted into a suitable format for you. The next image is postprocessed with Zoner Photo Studio and the color temperature is changed from a default of 4250K (set by the camera) to a cloudy day (6500) and in the end to a daylight image (5200K).

In most cases the camara will proably do a good guess and set the color temperature (almost) correctly. But sometimes it will not, at least not my camera.

First picture, original:

Second picture, changed to 6500K:

Last picture, set to 5200K:

The last image is much more realistic and colorful than the other images.