White balance

I tend to leave white balance in Auto mode but chimping a shot early yesterday it looked much cooler than reality, so I changed to one of the presets. Turns out a simple way of doing this is to click the Preview switch next to the shutter button whilst in WB select mode and it holds an image which you can then test in the different WB settings. But you all probably knew that! And in Lightroom you can see the Kelvin number of the selected preset - shade is 7700, cloudy is 6400 and so on. I know it is easy to use Auto and change in post processing but it is useful to see the right results on site.

I don’t use AWB, even for RAW ....I always use a preset with fine tuning tweaking. I find the best time to get colours right is when you still have the scene / subject right in front of you. The ‘As Shot’ WB values are transferred directly via metadata to RAW conversion software anyway, so if it’s right in the camera it can be just as right on the computer as well.

Pitfalls to avoid (and Ive fallen down them myself) is consistent colour management settings through your whole workflow, plus making sure your camera LCD is set as neutral as possible (to be able to accurately fine tune the WB setting while you are looking at the actual scene /subject).