Everything that you photograph has a color temperature. Almost all cameras have an auto white balance setting that you can use. That works just fine. But if you want to experiment with the settings, keep reading.
Light is measured in Kelvin. Regular daylight has a color temperature of 5200 approximately. That’s a good reference point. Shade is 7000. A cloudy day is roughly 6000. Tungsten light is roughly 3200. White fluorescent light is 4000. Flash is 6000, and so on.
This will be in your manual. The only reason that you need to know those numbers is when you want to adjust manually. For instance, sometimes your camera would be tricked by an orange sunset and it will end up over compensating it and you’ll end up losing some of the orange if you’re set in daylight.
You probably want to warm your color temperature up. Once you’ve imported your photos into your computer, you can process the picture in an editing program like Photoshop. You can adjust both the white balance and the color temperature on your computer.
All of the professionals do white balance differently. The most foolproof way to do it is to just shoot in Auto and then import into Photoshop. But with that said, if you’re shooting in JPEG format, you don’t have as much flexibility there as you would if you shot in RAW.
But you should know that when you’re looking at something with the human eye, a white object looks white regardless of the type of light. It doesn’t matter if you’re indoors with fluorescent light or outside on a cloudy day. The reason that you would set a custom white balance is to get a reference point, so you can use it to serve as a basis for color correction in Photoshop.