Color Temperature Estimator

Auto white balance is a camera actively working to make white things look white regardless of your actual lighting — that is its entire job, and it happens before any pixel data reaches a web page. What this tool reads is the color cast your camera did not fully correct, which is a real and useful signal about how your footage will actually look to other people, but it is not the same as measuring the room's true light temperature with a calibrated sensor.

For the steadiest reading, point the camera at a plain, evenly lit neutral surface. Busy, multi-colored scenes and unusual lighting mixes will genuinely produce a less reliable estimate — the confidence note above the result flags this when it happens.

1. Click "Start" and allow camera access when prompted.
2. Point the camera at a plain, evenly lit neutral surface — a wall, paper, or your own skin — for the steadiest reading.
3. Read your estimated Kelvin value and verdict.
4. Check the confidence note above the result, which flags busy or unusually mixed scenes as less reliable.

The tool samples a region of your live feed and compares the balance between the red and blue color channels. Warmer light sources push that balance toward red; cooler sources push it toward blue. That ratio is mapped to an approximate position on the standard blackbody locus used to define correlated color temperature in Kelvin.

This is explicitly an estimate from consumer webcam sensor data, not a spectrometer reading — the value is useful for spotting a mismatch between light sources, not for matching a precise Kelvin figure printed on a bulb box.

Zoom, Teams, and Meet expose no manual white-balance control at all — all three rely entirely on your camera driver's own auto white balance, which corrects color casts before the call software ever receives a frame.

OBS can reach manual white balance where the driver supports it, via the source's Properties → Configure Video dialog. Camera-manufacturer utilities from Logitech, Razer, and Elgato typically expose the same control more directly, and are the more reliable place to lock white balance for a consistent look across a whole session.

Mixing a warm desk lamp, cool overhead LEDs, and daylight from a window in the same shot confuses both your camera's own auto white balance and this tool's reading, since neither can reconcile three different color temperatures into one correct answer.

A bulb's packaging Kelvin rating is also a nominal figure, not a guarantee — cheaper bulbs, and especially dimmable LEDs run below full brightness, can drift measurably from their labeled temperature. Measuring your actual light with this tool is more reliable than trusting the box.