Manual WB

Hi,do you guys set your wb on every shot or do you set it with a grey/white card and leave it . I'm curious ......
Sean

I set it to the appropriate preset for the current purpose. So generally I use "Daylight".

On the K-5IIs I set it at 'Daylight' most often, with a tweak to the amber (one step), but with the K-3 the WB is so good/accurate that I leave it on the 'multi auto' setting.

It also depends on lenses you are using as some render warmer than others for a given WB setting.

Regards
David

I only use manual for rare and unusual lighting and even then it rarely works and I end up fixing it in post.

I usually use the auto mode.

Never used a grey card. I leave mine on auto unless I've got a specific reason for a fixed WB such as Pano shots where consitency is required.

I don't use the daylight setting as the WB of daylight is never the same.

I adjust colour balances in editing as necessary on a "if it looks wrong it's wrong" basis

Important thing is to make sure your monitor is calibrated

Before I was converted over to shooting in raw I used to leave the camera in auto WB and only adjust it if the first, test, shot did not look correct. This certainly happened in winter snow scenes with my K-5 where the auto WB tended to produce images with a blueish tint.

I also found that having the camera in auto WB helped avoid the embarrassment of forgetting to reset the WB before the next shoot .

Recently though I have gone over to almost always shooting in raw. This makes it easy to tinker with the white balance in post production for which I use lightroom 5. Again I leave the camera in auto WB as this creates a unique "as shot" option along with the standard and custom WB options.

I have to agree with David. My K3 produces excellent results in auto WB although I have not had it long enough to try it out in winter snow.

Glyn

I also switch off the feature that allows the camera to adjust the presets within small limits. The point of using a fixed setting is that the colour of the light does change. If we want to record this as is then a fixed setting is arguably best.

An example is a red sunset. If we want to see that red in its full glory then Daylight will give us that. AWB will try to reduce the effect to make it "correct".

Some of our cameras (K7 / K5, maybe K3 for sure?) have a CTE White Balance setting - 'colour temperature enhance', which basically tries to do what John was saying just above - ie: make sure we don't lose too much amber tone on daylight when the sun is low. It could be worth trying. Like others here I mostly use daylight with plus 1 or 2 amber, and I rarely need to make whitebalance adjustments specifically in post - I find its better to selectively adjust individual colours, both in saturation strength and luminance if needed.

But generally I agree with the idea that auto settings are best avoided, as they will tend to try and reduce dominant casts, so not good for low-light outdoors work in general - AWB is effective for mixed lighting I find, ie 'slow-sync' flash situations where theres flashlight and a bit of ambient.