Why photos come out yellow, blue or green
A camera has to guess the colour of the light. Ordinary bulbs and candles are orange-yellow, shade and overcast skies are blue, and some fluorescent and LED lights lean green. When the guess is off, white walls and faces take on that colour.
Correcting it means making things that should be neutral — white paper, a grey road, clouds — look neutral again. Everything else in the photo shifts with them.
Using Temperature and Tint
Find something that should be grey or white. If it looks yellow, move Temperature toward minus; if it looks blue, toward plus. A green cast is corrected with Tint toward plus (magenta), a magenta cast with Tint toward minus.
Work in small steps — most casts need between 10 and 30. Both sliders keep overall brightness unchanged, so correcting the colour does not make the photo darker or lighter.
How auto white balance works — and where it stops
Auto white balance averages near-grey pixels — mid-brightness, saturation below 20%, not clipped — in linear light, then moves Temperature and Tint toward neutral at about 60% and 50% strength, capped at ±30 and ±20. The sentence under the sliders says what it changed and why.
If fewer than 3% of pixels qualify, it leaves the colour alone and tells you. Under very strong artificial light, truly grey surfaces become too coloured to be recognised as grey: in our tests on synthetic scenes, a strong tungsten cast was corrected only about halfway (Temperature −18). Finish such photos by hand.
Sunsets, candlelight and colour you want to keep
In a sunset or a candlelit dinner, the warm colour is the point of the photo, and neutralising it removes the mood. That is why auto white balance skips scenes with little neutral grey; for golden-hour portraits, lower Temperature only a little (−5 to −10).
Snow and white beaches look blue in shade. Auto white balance limits itself to ±15 on such bright scenes so it does not swing the colour too far; a small plus Temperature by hand often looks most natural.
Mixed lighting cannot be fixed with one setting
With window light (blue) and an indoor lamp (yellow) in the same photo, one global setting can neutralise only one of them. Correct for the light falling on the main subject, then accept the rest, or lower Vibrance slightly to calm the other colour.
Auto white balance takes the average of both lights, so it moves little in mixed scenes — in our synthetic mixed-light test it changed Temperature by only +5 and Tint by +8.
Vibrance, saturation and colour accuracy
After a cast is removed, colours can look dull. Vibrance +10 to +20 strengthens muted colours while boosting skin only half as much; Saturation raises every colour equally and −100 makes the photo black and white.
Colours are processed and saved in standard sRGB. iPhone photos with a Display P3 profile are converted to sRGB, so the most vivid reds and greens can become slightly less intense. Screens also differ: check the result on the kind of device where the photo will be viewed.