White Balance.

Can anyone offer me advice please? I am looking for help with colour matching.

I have found two methods, these being the Grey Card and the White Balance Lens Hood which seems not unlike the old Weston Invercone to look at. Aside from the obvious consideration that you would only need to buy one grey card to suit all lenses regardless of filter size, which would give me the most reliable results please?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can offer help.

First time i hear about a White Balance Lens Hood you've a link?

This might also be a solution if you shoot RAW, a bit more expensive but it also correct/calibrate your colours.
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/reviews/photography/colorchecker-passport_1.h...

I use a grey card occasionally. I bought a set of grey, black and white credit card sized cards. They came with a lanyard too.

I got mine here, but there are plenty of them around.

For the best accuracy a WhiBal filter. A grey card is also OK but nowhere near as accurate because the photographed RGB values do vary slightly.

I've also bought a QPCard quite cheap and interesting. You can DL the software for free and try it on a few supplied Jpegs.

I bought the QPcard Sample Pack for around £20

http://www.premier-ink.co.uk

Expodisk is good.

At that price it should be!

Couldn't find a white balance lens hood...
Do you mean a lens cap maybe?

The problem with those is that they don't measure the white balance at the source so if the source is in a different light the white balance is still off, a gray card is probably the best tool and you can use that for your exposure as well.

When I'm doing studio work for still products, I put a Macbeth (or the like) color chart in the bottom of the frame on each picture. The chart contains white, neutral gray, black, and about 15 other colors. Since I have the RGB value for each of the color swatch, I can get perfect color match all the time. It's a tad more complicated than using only the white balance, but it will correct the discrepancy that creeps up in the processing. Quite often, using white balance only, some colors will show a strong bias that will be easy to correct with a color chart.

Sorry meant Expodisk not Whibal, Peter's post reminded me of it. Whibal is an expensive piece of grey plastic which is probably better than a normal grey card.

I use the camera's presets most of the time and have saved one setting which warms up the 'Flash' pre-set since my studio heads are slightly cool.

If you shoot RAW WB doesn't matter at all at the shooting stage.

If we are shooting pictorial subjects, where the colour of the light may be part of the beauty of the scene, then Daylight is a good setting, or Shade or Cloudy if you prefer something warmer still.

Using AWB will result in the camera trying to "correct" the colour of the light, which may not be what we want.

I didn't notice it before, there is a very good small movie showing how to use QPCard 201 here

I believe we see the world in daylight colour but never found good solid read about it.

The trouble with our eyes, or looking at it another way the advantage, is that we adapt. A sort of biological AWB.