TIPS - If your Indoor Photos Look Yellow

/ PHOTO BASICS /
One of the first lessons you learn when you graduate from taking snapshots to taking photographs is that cameras don't see the world the way our eyes do. The difference between our view of the world and our camera's view can be frustrating at first.
Color temperature is one of the ways that our camera sees the world that we often don't notice, and it is the primary reason that your indoor photos come out looking yellow.  The color temperature coming from light bulbs is what causes a color cast.


​Most lightbulbs (incandescent) produce a very yellow photo.
What you do need to know is that there are warm tones and cool tones. Your camera measures color temperature using the white balance. Most of the time, your camera is set to Auto White Balance (AWB) and makes its own decisions about the color temperature of your subject. If the camera thinks the color temperature is the same as daylight, but you are actually getting indoor light, the photo will often come out too warm. The result will be a yellow looking photo.
Normally, a camera is excellent at choosing the correct white balance for the lighting conditions, but in a home, cameras have mixed light sources.  All homes have windows, which bring in daylight balanced light for most of the day.  So if you take a picture of someone indoors, the camera sees the warm light from the lightbulb and the neutral light from the window, and it usually picks the color temperature from the window to control the white balance (since it is far brighter than a lightbulb).
Fortunately, there are multiple ways to correct this.
​Shoot with the right color temperatureYou can set the white balance in camera before you shoot. The technically correct way to do this is to set your white balance manually using a white or neutral gray card. A large one can be picked up for around $10 (one side white and one side gray). You will have to read your manual to determine how to navigate to the correct menu for Custom White Balance and also to understand the process to set the white balance. Whatever the process, it's important that the card is placed in the same light as your intended subject.
Another option is to set the white balance using one of the camera's pre-determined settings. These include settings like incandescent, tungsten, and florescent for indoor lighting. Tungsten was the filament used in incandescent light bulbs and the color temperature it emits often results in the yellow color cast in photos. Since many of the new light bulbs have the same color temperature they will cause the same problems.
Setting your camera to incandescent or tungsten will help eliminate this problem. The florescent setting is used with florescent lights which have their own color cast issues. Many point and shoot cameras have a color temperature setting like I mentioned above, so it is a widely available fix for color cast issues.