How To Adjust White Balance

Quoting from a review of the XS:




Using this Custom setting I guess you would take a photo of a white card under the illumination you want to use and the camera will save that setting as Custom. Unfortunately you can't set the Kelvin temperature directly with the XS. There also seems to be a menu option to tweak the white balance of a given setting on two axes: blue-amber and magenta-green. If using the "Custom" method doesn't work, maybe you could set it to "Tungsten" and then tweak the colours from the menu if it doesn't look right.




Are all the bulbs that you would use at once during a single exposure of the same colour temperature?

The Custom white balance setting is designed to make its calculation of white balance from the light reflecting off a white surface. You should be able to simply take a photo of the white surface and then tell the camera to base its white balance off that photo. This only needs to be done once. If you camera can only remember one custom setting at a time though, then you'll have to set your custom white balance again when changing light sources.

Probably your incandescent lights and the LEDs are going to have two different colour temperatures. It is not possible to set the camera's white balance for both at the same time. For this reason, you generally don't want to mix lights of different colour temperatures. If you're not using incandescent and LED at the same time, no need to worry.

Here is the link to a video demonstrating setting of custom white balance on a Canon Rebel XSi - should be similar to your camera:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq3yzTPb1Ng