By Todd Ogasawara on August 24, 2009 4:45 AM

HTC Touch Pro2 Camera White Balance Settings: Don’t Use the Default Auto White Balance!

HTC Touch Pro2 Auto-white balance (left) – Sunlight white balance (right)

If you read digital photography books or blogs, you’ve probably see the frequent tip not to use your cameras automatic white balance setting. You are advised to try to match one of your point-and-shoot digital camera’s white balance presets to match current lighting conditions or, better yet, use your camera’s while balance matching feature to tell it what you consider white in the current scene (not all cameras have this feature).

This advice holds true for phone cameras too. The photo on left above was actually a test of my newly purchased HTC Touch Pro2′s auto-focus feature. I wanted to see if it could simulate a macro lens and get a clear photo of a leaf. But, a quick photo review on the phone’s display revealed the colors were way off from what the leaf looked like right in front of me. The leaf in the first photo has is shifted towards magenta. This is especially noticable in the portion of the leaf that is red. This is the result of using the default auto-white balance setting. I usually test products with default configurations left as-is since I believe most people leave products in default configurations. The photo on the right was taken about a minute after the photo on the left. However, I changed the white-balance to the Touch Pro2′s sunlight preset. The colors in this photo is much closer to what I actually saw. Of course, the colors in these photos differ from display to display (CRT or LCD). So, the differences between the two photos may not look different at all for some of you while they may appear wildly different from others.

The lesson to be learned is to check the white balance options for the camera in your phone. If you have white-balance settings to choose from, try them out under various conditions to see what works best for your photos.