White balance ?

[joel222]

After recieving my first dslr about a week ago I have just got my head around exposure, as in how the factors of aperture, iso and shutter speed effect each other. I have been taking a few shots in manual mode and i'm quite pleased as at first I thought i'd never grasp it. My question is this, when in manual mode, do you need to set the white balance depending on your surroundings/light or if its left in auto will that be fine?

 

[Martyn...]

After recieving my first dslr about a week ago I have just got my head around exposure, as in how the factors of aperture, iso and shutter speed effect each other. I have been taking a few shots in manual mode and i'm quite pleased as at first I thought i'd never grasp it. My question is this, when in manual mode, do you need to set the white balance depending on your surroundings/light or if its left in auto will that be fine?

Auto will be fine for now, however if you are outside and it is sunny, setting it to sunny will improve the accuracy of the colours in your images.

I tend to have mine set to sunny most of the time, but I shoot in raw and can tweak things easily enough when processing the images.

 

[HoppyUK]

You have four options with white balance.

1) Auto will do its best to adjust itself, and is usually fine in daylight. Some cameras are better than others in artificial light though.
2) Use one of the pre-sets (daylight, tungsten, fluorescent etc).
3) Do a custom white balance for the particular scene (see handbook).

All these settings will show on the LCD.

4) Correct the colour in post processing. If you shoot Raw, you can change it to whatever you like, though the LCD will show the effect of whatever was set in 1, 2, 3.