Fixing colour: white balance, the eyedropper, and Auto
Why your indoor photos look orange, how the eyedropper corrects a whole frame from a single pixel, and what Auto actually changes.
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Almost every photo that feels off before you can say why is a white balance problem. The exposure is fine, the composition is fine, but the whites are cream, or the skin is grey, or the whole room has a green cast from a ceiling light. Filmode has three ways to fix it, and one of them takes a single tap.
What white balance actually is
Light has a colour temperature, measured in kelvin. Candlelight is around 1900K and very orange. Household bulbs sit near 2700K. Midday sun is about 5500K. Open shade under a blue sky can reach 8000K and beyond.
Your eyes adapt to this instantly and invisibly. A camera has to be told. When the camera guesses wrong — and it guesses wrong indoors constantly — everything neutral in the frame picks up a cast. White balance is the correction: you tell the app what the light was, and it takes that colour back out.
The Temperature slider
The blunt instrument, and often the only one you need. Drag warm to counter a photo shot under cool light; drag cool to kill the orange in a photo shot under a bulb.
The trap is that warmth is also a look. If you warm a photo because you like warm photos, you are grading, not correcting — and you should do that after correcting, not instead of it. Get the frame neutral first, then decide how far from neutral you want to end up.
The eyedropper — the one-tap fix
Open White Balance and you get an eyedropper. Tap something in the photo that should be a neutral grey or white — a white shirt, a sheet of paper, a grey wall, the white of an eye, concrete — and the app reads the colour of that pixel, works out the colour temperature the light must have had, and corrects the whole frame to match.
This is the fastest correct answer in the app. It also fails in an interesting way, which is worth knowing: it can only be as good as the thing you tap. Tap a shirt that is actually cream and the photo goes cold. Tap a wall lit by a lamp on one side and daylight on the other and you will get the average of two different lights. Look for something genuinely neutral and genuinely lit by the light you want to correct.
If the first tap overshoots, tap somewhere else. It is not cumulative — each tap replaces the last reading.
Auto — a starting point, not an answer
Auto reads the photo's overall brightness and sets exposure, contrast and saturation to sensible values for it. On a flat, underexposed, grey-looking frame it is genuinely useful: one tap and you can see what is actually in the picture.
What it is not is a finished edit. It does not know what your subject is or what you want the photo to feel like. Use it to get off zero on a difficult frame, then take over.
Saturation, Fade and the rest of the colour block
Three more tools round out colour work:
- Saturation — global intensity. Small moves. Anything past a nudge and skin is the first thing to go wrong.
- Fade — lifts the black point and washes the image slightly, the print-left-in-the-sun look. Pairs beautifully with a warm LUT and terribly with a high-contrast one.
- Clarity — local contrast in the midtones. Adds presence to texture: stone, fabric, weather. Keep it away from faces.
A five-second routine for indoor photos
- Open White Balance, tap the eyedropper, tap something white or grey in the frame.
- Check skin. If it went slightly green or magenta, nudge the temperature back a little.
- Lift Shadows — indoor light is directional and always leaves something too dark.
- Now pick a LUT, if you want one.
Do it in that order and warm-looking photos come out warm because you chose it, not because the ceiling light did.