Help with white balance please!

C

Chumpalot

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Edit My Images
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Evening everyone.

As some of you may know, I went out today to take some pictures of the snow. I had somewhat of a successful time but when it came to editing the pictures I noticed on every single picture I had to ramp up not only the temperature but the exposure as well to just make the picture look normal.

I'm certain my white balance is out on my D40x (though I'm sure I set this up when I first got the camera). Perhaps the snow has proved me incorrect. I have exposure set to +0.3 and one thing I did notice was that all of my shots has a sort of blue hue/tint to them.

What settings do people you folks use when taking pictures of something that should be pure white? I'd be interested to know.

Thanks for the help in advance.

Dave

Forgot to add, kit used was a D40x with Nikon 18-70 DX.
 
Chumpalot said:
Evening everyone.

As some of you may know, I went out today to take some pictures of the snow. I had somewhat of a successful time but when it came to editing the pictures I noticed on every single picture I had to ramp up not only the temperature but the exposure as well to just make the picture look normal.

I'm certain my white balance is out on my D40x (though I'm sure I set this up when I first got the camera). Perhaps the snow has proved me incorrect. I have exposure set to +0.3 and one thing I did notice was that all of my shots has a sort of blue hue/tint to them.

What settings do people you folks use when taking pictures of something that should be pure white? I'd be interested to know.

Thanks for the help in advance.

Dave

Forgot to add, kit used was a D40x with Nikon 18-70 DX.
Click to expand...

What do you mean when you say you set the White Balance up?

You can set the White Balance to Auto and the camera will adjust it and try to set it correctly.
You can set the White Balance to presets for different lighting, Daylight, Tungsten etc
You can set the White Balance to a Custom setting which is correct for the colour of the lighting when you set it.
 
Snowy landscapes are among the trickiest situations to photograph with digital cameras. The exposure and white balance settings can easily be fooled by the bright lighting conditions.
The very bright snow acts as a second light source by reflecting sunlight shining on the ground. If the sky is blue and the light is very bright, setting the white balance accurately is even more important. Most of the time the preset white balance modes cannot handle this situation, resulting in a strong blue cast in all your images. In this case, the best way to achieve a correct white balance is to use the Custom or Manual white balance mode. By simply pointing the camera to a clean patch of snow, a proper balance of colours can be set that will remain valid for your entire session.
well thats what i do.:)
 
Thank you all for the replies. I had the camera set to auto before, clearly this won't do for snowy scenes.

James, thank you for the advice. The blue cast is exactly what I'm getting. I will try what you say tomorrow and see how this affects this pics. As you can see from my Flickr, I can get them to look normal but only after quite a bit of editing, mostly increasing the temperature from 4,600 to around 6k. Even then I think I'm losing some detail in the more snowy scenes.

Cheers

Dave
 
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