Color temperature describes how warm or cool a light looks, measured in kelvin. A candle sits near two thousand kelvin and looks orange, while open shade can reach eight thousand kelvin and looks blue.
Your camera can only be balanced for one color at a time, so mixed sources create a problem you cannot fully fix later.
Tungsten bulbs and candles run warm and read orange on screen. Daylight and many LED panels set to daylight run cool and read blue.
The numbers move in the opposite direction to intuition. Lower kelvin is warmer, higher kelvin is cooler.
Learn two anchors and you can guess the rest. Indoor bulbs near three thousand, daylight near five thousand six hundred.
Put a warm lamp beside a cool window and the two colors meet on the same face. One side turns orange and the other turns blue.
No single white balance setting fixes both sides at once. You can correct one and the other gets worse.
The fix happens on set, not in the edit. Match the sources or remove one of them.
Your eye corrects for color without telling you. The camera never does. Trust the kelvin number, not your gut.
Put a correction gel on the lamp to match daylight, or set your LED panels to the same kelvin as the room. Matching beats fixing.
When you cannot match, block the odd light out and use one color for the whole scene.
Set white balance by hand, using a white card, and stop relying on auto. Auto white balance drifts when the frame changes.
Once the base is neutral you can add color for mood. A touch of warmth on the key reads as friendly and a cool back light reads as distant.
Keep skin close to neutral even when the scene is stylized, because viewers read odd skin tone as an error rather than a choice.
Change color after you have solved contrast and exposure, never before.
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