K20D settings advice needed

I am the first to admit that I am a complete neophyte when it comes to digital photography. It is quite a steep learning curve and very different from what I am used to or even what I expected (I am not sure what I expected, except that it would be more straightforward ()

I expect that my first shots will be variable as I learn my way around the K20 but that's the trouble, they are not very variable at all. I have tried manual and green settings, aperture priority and sensitivity priority, artificial light and bright sunlight, you name it, to try and see what different results each yields and I seem to have fairly consistent issues with white balance or colour temperature perhaps. So there is something I am not doing right or failing to set up correctly.

I have set it to shoot raw all the time so felt that white balance shouldn't be an issue (or am I wrong?). I even reset every button to make sure there were no erroneous values creeping in and set everything to AWB where possible and the shots to 'bright' etc

Simple shots of the garden come out great. It seems to love greens and nature colours but when I try and do packshots of my products for my website in a tent, either indoors under 5000K lights or outside under bright sunlight, they all seem to come out with some sort of blue cast on them and very 'grey', almost regardless of my settings...

To get them to be pleasing to the eye I have to do massive corrections on the PC post process (I have found a program called Photo-brush to be very user friendly for this as I can't seem to understand the Pentax software ).

On each shot I have to play with white balance and almost without fail bring the blue back down to the same sort of levels as the green and reds; I have to boost the brightness and exposure by at least one stop and various other tinkering to try and make them look like they look in real life. Some I can't seem to get right at all due to this 'blue cast' the seems to be over the whole picture.

What am I not doing right or overlooking? It is not the old lenses as I am getting the same results with the DA*16-50 on auto or manual settings. I have tried almost every combination of settings that I can think of; from fully auto to fully manual but obviously I have a 'blind spot' here (excuse the metaphor), and yes the histogram looks perfect on the review on the LCD (although I am sure reading histograms is an art all in itself)

Advice appreciated from our knowledgeable members

I use AWB most of the time. But for the light tent you should set the WB to the colour temp of your light source. You can either select 5000 or use the custom WB feature.

In a light tent you will also need to adjust the exposure. The meter will try to render the white background grey.

I never rely on AWB; Mine's set semi-permanently to "Daylight" unless I'm shooting under tungsten when I switch to "Tungsten". I also shoot RAW so if the colours happen to be way off (which they rarely are using this technique) then it's a simple job to change them in post processing.

This way I get consistency if nothing else. When I regularly shot film I accepted that the film loaded had a certain white balance (always daylight for me) and I'd use a filter if I was shooting indoors under artificial light, what I never did was make tiny adjustments with an array of filters after every single shot trying to get the colours just so.

Digital has brought many benefits but I think in some areas (like this) it just complicates things more than absolutely neccessary. Keep it simple, ignore the auto options and all should be well once more.

JPEG Premium setting
sRGB
Daylight or Cloudy WB
Bright
+1 Contrast
+1 Sharpness
Centre spot only AF coupled to exposure lock
Av mode
Centre weighted metering

When you have practised with this for a while you will know if you need RAW or other variations. You've got plenty to get used to before making life too complicated!

I appreciate the feedback and have noted about the 'greying' in a light tent, much like shooting snow I guess, and I have tried increasing the exposure to compensate too, but I am still not sure why I am getting this strong blue cast over the whole picture. It is almost as if it had a blue filter in front of the lens making the entire picture bluer and darker.

Am I right in thinking that white balance is a redundant feature if shooting raw as it is designed to be adjusted to taste PP?

Interesting to note that Peter uses AWB most of the time whereas Hefty never relies on it.

Life was much simpler before but I will practise with John's recommended settings as a benchmark and then report back if I may.

I am still convinced there is something I am not getting or have overlooked, because it shouldn't be this difficult to shoot relatively simple packshots under bright light.

To be honest I got perfectly exposed and balanced packshots using the exact same light tent and using my Sony Cybershot P&S camera, so that's why I am really baffled as I upgraded to a DSLR thinking that I could get better results not worse

I look at the shots on my website of my product done with the cybershot and they are perfectly exposed and have the right colours and temperature, not too warm not too cold, straight out of the camera with no PP, so this is really irritating me that I haven't cracked this one with the K20.

Correct, but to a degree. If you're shooting RAW then getting the wrong white balance certainly isn't much of a big deal as you can apply a new WB in PP, however, if you get it right at capture it's one less thing to have to do back at the computer. If you're shooting JPEG then obviously getting it right at capture assumes a much greater importance.

That's the beauty of digital! There are so many options, customisations and different ways of doing things that no two photographers (even if using identical equipment) have to use the same methods to get what they want. Most of the time I use my K10D as a glorified ME Super - in other words I set WB to daylight, ISO to 400 and all other image parameters to zero (just like I'd loaded a roll of 400 film) and shoot 95% of the time in aperture priority / matrix metering / selected focus point. It's nice to have the option to use all the other features to make an almost unlimited set of combinations but I don't as a rule, I like it to be quite simple.

You'll soon find a way of working that you're comfortable with, it just may take a little while.

I always shoot RAW+JPG, and nearly always use AWB outdoors. Indoors I use the flash setting if shooting flash, or experiment if not to find what works best.

When I first got a DSLR I couldn't for the life of me understand the purpose of RAW+JPG. But since I often shoot away from home, and download to a Linux netbook, I have come to value the option of reviewing JPGs at the time, and getting serious with RAW on return.

The "overhead" of saving both is only about 10%.

In my experience I very seldom have to alter the colour balance when using AWB.

G

Perhaps I should have made myself a bit clearer.

I shoot raw all the time, and when processing if I find a better WB that the camera AWB setting, I will apply that to all photos taken under the same lighting. I do find that the K10 AWB is fine for outdoor daylight almost all the time.

set your white balance off the white wall of your light tent, and it should be fine. better yet, use a greycard to get both color balance and exposure set.

It's a bit more with a K20 George!

RAW + Premium JPEG always comes in around 20-25MB per shot in total!