White Balance issues

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jameslongstrong

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James
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I always shoot with auto white balance. The reason being I don't understand how it works or how I can change it to my advantage. Can anyone shed any light on what advantages there are for setting up WB correctly and what I should be doing?

Cheers in advance!
 
I have no experiecne of white balance on a Canon, so can't say how accurate it is, but generally if the results look the right colour you don't need to change it! The recen tsnow is a good one for fooling white balance, and you may have noticed a blue tint to snow pics, you would want to change the white balance in this circumstance to get the colour right again.

Indoor lighting is another good one which will often give you very yellow looking images, again you would want to alter the white balance here.

I assume you can choose some preset ones? They're often a good place to start, and if none suit then Custom is the way to go, plenty of folks on here better placed than me to tell you how on your specific camera.
 
If you shoot in RAW, then you needn't worry, just change it in software later on until the colour looks like it did at the time.
 
If you shoot in raw you can quite easily correct it. Using AWB will be the best setting most of the time anyway.
 
If you shoot in RAW, you can adjust the white balance in PP, but if you want to get it right in-camera during the actual shoot, you may have to resort to setting a custom white balance. Personally I just leave the camera on Auto WB because 99% of the time it gets it close enough and it's so easy to tweak it later to personal taste in the RAW editor. It's just one less thing to worry about.
 
Like most things it depend what you are shooting :)

AWB does a decent job for one off shots but the "problem" with AWB is that it can vary shot to shot depending on changing light. I have seen swings of over 200K. If you have a window at one end of a room and a lamp at the other then the WB will change just by turning round as the camera sees the different light sources.

The other presets are actually more handy. At least they don't move! So my advice is to choose one close to the conditions you are shooting in. Daylight/cloudy/tungsten/flourescent and flash are the others most commonly used.

If you shoot in RAW you can also change a whole batch of images in one go in LR. That's exactly what I do processing weddings. All the ceremony shots will be balanced the same so they all look cohesive when finished. I simply pick what looks like the right WB for the feel of the images (sometimes a little warmer than technically correct) and that's how the whole set are processed.

So there are distinct advantages in getting away from AWB unless you shoot just one image at a time. You just need to have a look at your manual and see what lights the others are for. :) Then go and have a play. Try shooting at home and see the effects of the different colour temperatures.
 
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James to see what difference changing white balance can make, try taking two photos indoors under normal household lighting of the same subject. First with your WB set to tungsten, and then with your WB set to daylight.

Your tungsten image should have colours fairly close to how you see them. With the daylight setting image, you should be able to see a distinct yellow/orange tint.

The AWB setting on your camera will do a pretty good job in a lot of situations, but occasionally you can improve on it by setting your white balance to a setting that closely matches the lighting you are taking photographs in.

As others have said, if you are shooting in raw all of this is largely academic, as you have the ability to correct the white balance of your images in post much more successfully than you can if you are shooting jpgs.
 
Cheers guys. I don't do any pp so I try to get the best out of what I can. I guess it's a case of having a play and seeing what I can do. It's just when I first got an SLR I was determined to not shoot in auto and now only shoot in manual. I think there are now other techniques I can try to get more from the pictures I take.
 
James, if you shoot RAW you NEED to Pp your images.

If you shoot jpeg you are OK but RAW images are just that, RAW as in unfinished. DSLR's have something called an antialiasing filter in front of the sensor that makes the images straight out of camera look soft. They need sharpening at least.

If you want to get the best out of your images you need to be PPing them, otherwise you are only doing half the job.
 
jameslongstrong said:
I always shoot with auto white balance. The reason being I don't understand how it works or how I can change it to my advantage. Can anyone shed any light on what advantages there are for setting up WB correctly and what I should be doing?

Cheers in advance!
Click to expand...

The colour of an object changes according to the light falling on it. Our eyes correct this automatically, but the camera needs help. White balance changes the ratios of red to blue to green light, so that it looks right.

AWB is notoriously poor in artificial light. There are two other options - to choose one of the pre-sets, which often works well, or do a custom white balance off a plain white surface, which is very easy (see handbook). To see what the pre-sets do, put the camera on live view and flick through them.

Or you can correct the white balance in post processing. Working on the Raw fil allows you to do anything, but you can also tweak slight changes with JPEGs.

A useful tip if you're shooting Raw is to include a reference white or neutral grey subject (a card say) in one of the images at the beginning of a shoot, and then pick up on that in post processing. The software will measure and correct that, and the adjustment can then be applied to the whole batch.
 
In most good lighting conditions, AWB does the job fine, even on my stone age 1Ds. As Hoppy has said though, under artificial lighting (sodium street lighting for instance) it makes a right hash of it. so you'd be better off compensating manually in camera or in post.
 
Cheers for the advice guys. I've been out today and shot in all different WB modes. Before I didn't really appreciate how different the shot would look but today after sitting having lunch and taking a shot using tungsten and shade modes then the difference is amazing.

I think I'll now have a look at setting a manual WB and see how much better I can make the shots.
 
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