Setting White Balance

Can anyone help me, I have question about setting white balance. Up until now I haven’t given it much thought and just left in auto “AWB” setting on my K20D.

Having shot some images in RAW the other day I found I had to take the temperature down a little whilst processing, to get best colours in my photos.

This leads me to ask the question, should I be relying on AWB or setting it correctly before shooting?

Please note this is all linked to my questions on shooting with high ISO so I am working in low indoor light situation. However, as a point of reference should I always being setting the white balance before shooting or is this over kill?

Al the best

Andrzej

Particularly for indoor shooting, setting a manual white balance before every session is good if you want the subject colour to look as neutral or "correct" as possible. For RAW, by the way, an alternative to in-camera setting is to take a shot of a white or grey object and adjust the balance in processing later.

Otherwise it's a matter of personal preference. Using a preset white balance can help to capture or enhance the natural warmth or coolness of the light at that time of day or weather condition.

My preference is to shoot with WB set to daylight. Take a pic of a white or grey card and adjust in PP. This only really works satisfactorily if the lighting temperature is reasonably constant.

AWB is not very good in tungsten lighting, no matter how bright or dim (the light that is, not the photographer).

my experience so far on using my K10D is that AWB can't be relied on too much and I am glad I shoot RAW and can adjust later.

Take for example the way the weather has been this last week. Overcast one minute, bright sunshine the next. Cloudy WB seems better than AWB when its cloudy as AWB seems to wash colours out. But as soon as the sun comes out again AWB is fine.

I do like the custom white balance approach with white card indoors but sometimes find it's not always right and drains the skin tones of people. When that happened recently I applied the in camera colour adjustment, I think it was a cyan blue filter and that did the trick. I've had my K10D for 8 months and am only now seeing the benefit of the colour adjustment settings. Also indoors after a custom WB setting I will try adjusting to the tungsten setting to see if this is any better or worse. As with the what Mannesty says AWB is not much good in tungsten lighting, but if there's a good proportion of daylight from a window you might be fine.

My advice would be to see what works for you and put the cameras settings to the test. Its always good to try and avoid too much work for yourself so doing things in camera for me is the best way to go. Personally I shoot RAW+JPG setting and for the most part delete the RAW if I am happy with the jpg, if not do some in camera adjustment, then when happy only keep that jpg. I don't want a hard drive full of RAW files I will never need. Like you I started only using AWB then started to do other things. Thats the way of it when you're learning how your camera works.

Hi All

Just to let you know I had another session with the theatre group last night and took you advice on White Balance set-up. I had a play with a few white balance settings prior to the performance and felt that it was toss up between “normal day light” and “tungsten bulb”.

I opted for the “normal day light” settings as I felt the colours were a little more vibrant and there also appeared to be less noise on the higher ISO settings. I have shot in RAW so I will have to scope to make some changes during processing.

I also did some black and white shots which look promising, as especially during that part of the performance when the light was quite low and the noise was becoming quite apparent in colour shots.

It would have been nice to have taken a white card and seen if I could have set the white balance via the temperature setting as well, to see how this would have come out. Perhaps I will try this next time.

Thanks for all your advice

Andrzej

I like using unusual lighting and certainly don't want the AWB trying to correct it. So I set Daylight or Cloudy and let the colours be what they are.

AWB is fine gor general purposes, but not when you are after specific effects. It's no good taking a sunset picture that is "corrected" by AWB!

on the custom white balance with a white card. In a concert it won't be any good as the light on stage varies too much and the light infront of you will be very different to the stage. I have just used AWB shooting in RAW at a gig and altered after if need be.