In photography and image processing, color balance is the global adjustment of the intensities of the colors (typically red, green, and blue primary colors). An important goal of this adjustment is to render specific colors – particularly neutral colors – correctly; hence, the general method is sometimes called gray balance, neutral balance, or white balance. Color balance changes the overall mixture of colors in an image and is used for color correction; generalized versions of color balance are used to get colors other than neutrals to also appear correct or pleasing.

Image data acquired by sensors – either film or electronic image sensors – must be transformed from the acquired values to new values that are appropriate for color reproduction or display. Several aspects of the acquisition and display process make such color correction essential – including the fact that the acquisition sensors do not match the sensors in the human eye, that the properties of the display medium must be accounted for, and that the ambient viewing conditions of the acquisition differ from the display viewing conditions.

The color balance operations in popular image editing applications usually operate directly on the red, green, and blue channel pixel values, without respect to any color sensing or reproduction model. In shooting film, color balance is typically achieved by using color correction filters over the lights or on the camera lens.

Generalized color balance

Sometimes the adjustment to keep neutrals neutral is called white balance, and the phrase color balance refers to the adjustment that in addition makes other colors in a displayed image appear to have the same general appearance as the colors in an original scene. It is particularly important that neutral (gray, achromatic, white) colors in a scene appear neutral in the reproduction. Hence, the special case of balancing the neutral colors (sometimes gray balance, neutral balance, or white balance) is a particularly important – perhaps dominant – element of color balancing.

Normally, one would not use the phrase color balance to describe the adjustments needed to account for differences between the sensors and the human eye, or the details of the display primaries. Color balance is normally reserved to refer to correction for differences in the ambient illumination conditions. However, the algorithms for transforming the data do not always clearly separate out the different elements of the correction. Hence, it can be difficult to assign color balance to a specific step in the color correction process. Moreover, there can be significant differences in the color balancing goal. Some applications are created to produce an accurate rendering – as suggested above. In other applications, the goal of color balancing is to produce a pleasing rendering. This difference also creates difficulty in defining the color balancing processing operations.