WB ponderings

[pxl8]

I often see threads on various forums asking about white balance, AWB, CWB, etc, etc...

It strikes me that constantly trying to get the whites/greys neutral is the wrong thing to do for a lot of work. If you're shooting on a summer evening then the light is warm so why try to "correct" it?

Don't get me wrong, I can see many situations when the WB needs to be spot on (pack shots, formal portraits, etc.) but I can't help thinking that the colour of the light is part of the picture and not something that needs fixing. I generally shoot natural light and leave the WB on daylight - what do the rest of you fine people do wrt WB?

 

[Marcel]

I have been pondering the same just this past few days.

To answer your question. The problem is, is that digital cameras still aren't foolproof when it comes to reading colourtemperature. I have my camera set to AutoWB, and while my 30D now gets it right most of the time, I found that my 350 used to get it wrong sometimes.

Also, our eyes, in laymans terms, are very very powerful tools. We see a massive colour range, and our brain then converts that into an image.
Now while our eyes and brain correct what we see, the camera, to match this, has to do alot of work.

If you held a white piece of card at sunset, it looks white to you. If you held it on a cold winter morning, it looks white. If you hold it under your kitchen light it looks white.

If you take a photo of that same piece of card in those conditions, it won't look white on the resulting shot, hence the need to adjust the White Balance / Colour temperature accordingly.

I'm sure someone else will be along with a better explanation soon though :nuts: That's my wafflingly understanding of the subject anyway

Hope it helps.

 

[CT]

That's the key I think as Bod says - our brains compensate so that we see what we want to see. You don't realise how awfully orange tungsten light is until you look at the lighted windows of houses from outside at night.

Shooting RAW of course it doesn't matter what you set the WB on as it isn't assigned to the shot and can be corrected in processing. When shooting jpegs, I tend to leave the WB on Auto and find it copes pretty well with most forms of daylight and flash. Under artificial light I find the other presets totally unreliable and prefer to take a custom WB shot or set the WB in degs Kelvin.

 

[pxl8]

I understand how the brain compensates so whites look white but I was trained to switch that part of my brain off so I see the real colour of light. Part of that training came from art and partly from working in various labs. In both cases you need to see the actual colour in order to reproduce or correct it.

Perhaps a better way to explain my thinking is that a painter will add a colour cast to recreate what they saw, a photographer will try and remove it to reproduce what they "think" they saw.

 

[CT]

Perhaps a better way to explain my thinking is that a painter will add a colour cast to recreate what they saw, a photographer will try and remove it to reproduce what they "think" they saw.

Hmm.. fair point. I can see what you mean, but I doubt an artist would go for the awful result of taking portraits in my living room under tungsten light. I suspect, he'd go for something less extreme. That's the thing... the artist has complete creative freedom to get the result he wants... dab by dab, we don't have quite the same freedom?

No easy answer really I suppose.