Setting the White Balance for Nikon D200

Although the Nikon D200 comes with a handful of very handy presets for white balance, it may be necessary for you to set the white balance yourself. Finding the correct white balance (sometimes also called gray balance or neutral balance) is important if you want your camera to produce images the visually correct. In this article I will briefly touch on each setting for your Nikon D200, and what situation it is appropriate for. Selecting a White Balance Setting

Initially when you power up your Nikon D200 the camera is set to Auto White Balance, AWB. While this setting will work in most general situations, making adjustments based on camera pre-settings, it can sometimes cause issues such as incorrectly balancing and inconsistent balancing for multiple shots. Being a wholesale product photographer, this was a problem that I encountered with the AWB. Your lighting conditions will yield different white balances due to the color temperature of the lighting conditions. Fortunately the folks at Nikon put in nine different settings for the white balance white you can choose from.

In order to cycle through these make sure your D200 is powered up and press and hold the WB button on the left-hand side of the camera. While keeping the WB button depressed use the dial located at the top right-hand side of your camera to cycle through each setting.

In the following sections I will provide the name of each respective setting, a very brief description of it, and when it is appropriate to use it. If you have access to it, there is a hand table of these descriptions, and color temperatures in your Nikon D200 manual that came with your camera. The table is located on page 35 and can also be found online at Nikon's Web Site.

Auto

The Auto White Balance, or AWB, is the white balance setting the comes set as the default on your Nikon D200. The approximate color temperature for this setting is between 3,500 and 8,000 K. This setting is a good choice for most shooting conditions, especially when the photographer plans to work on the image in a photo editing suite, such as Adobe Photoshop.

Incandescent