Why do indoor photos look yellow or orange?

Household bulbs emit warm, orange light. Your eyes adapt to it automatically but the camera records it as it is. Set white balance to the tungsten preset or lower the kelvin value until whites look white.

What white balance should I use indoors?

Start with the tungsten or incandescent preset. If the room mixes lamp light with daylight from a window, set kelvin manually around 3000-4000K and judge by skin tone.

Is white balance the same as a warm filter?

No. A filter adds colour on top of the finished image. White balance changes what the camera treats as neutral while the image is being made.

Why do my indoor photos look orange?

You are in a warm, comfortable room. You take a photo and everything is orange. Your eyes did not see orange. The camera did. Here is the difference.

Light has a colour, and your brain hides it from you

Light is not neutral. A candle is deep orange. A household bulb is orange. Overcast sky is blue. Shade is very blue. This is measured in kelvin: low numbers are warm and orange, high numbers are cool and blue.

Your brain corrects for it automatically and continuously. Walk from a sunlit street into a lamp-lit room and white paper still looks white to you. It is not. Your brain is doing the work and never telling you.

The camera has no brain. It records the light that is actually there. Under a warm bulb, the light really is orange, so the photo really is orange.

Your photo is not wrong. It is showing you the colour of the light your brain has been quietly deleting.

White balance is the setting that does what your brain does

White balance tells the camera what kind of light you are standing in, so it can shift everything back until white looks white.

Auto — the camera guesses. Right most of the time, wrong in mixed light and under strong colour.
Tungsten / Incandescent — for household bulbs. Cools the image down.
Daylight — for sunshine.
Cloudy / Shade — warms the image, because that light is blue.
Kelvin — set the number yourself. Lower to cool it down, raise to warm it up.

For an orange room, either pick the bulb preset or drag kelvin down until skin looks like skin. There is no correct number — there is the number that looks right.

When auto white balance fails, and why

Auto white balance looks at the whole frame and guesses. It fails predictably:

Mixed light — a window and a lamp in the same room. There is no single right answer, so it picks a compromise nobody asked for.
One dominant colour — a red wall, a green field, a blue pool. The camera thinks the light is that colour and cancels it out.
Restaurants and stages — coloured lighting on purpose. Auto tries to remove exactly the mood you wanted to keep.

This is not the same as a filter

A warm filter adds orange on top of the picture. White balance changes what the camera considers neutral before the picture is made. One is makeup, the other is eyesight. If you fix an orange room with a filter, you are adding orange to orange.

Lensmera puts white balance on a dial with a live preview, so you can watch the room go from orange to neutral before you press the shutter, and it explains what the number means while you turn it.