White Balance settings

Hi,

i wonder if anyone can help.

If you are using flash indoors in a room with Tungsten lighting, should you set white balance to flash or tungsten setting.

Any help appreciated

Amer Khalil

Flash. The flash will be the dominant light source.

Having said that, I usually use AWB for flash.

There is a lot of talk about the K10D not being too good with AWB, but I tend to leave it set there and get very acceptable results, and maybe only need to tweek the odd one or two if correction is needed. Having said that everyone will have their own take on this. If colour is critical I would set the WB manually.
Harry

Or just shoot RAW and don't give a **** about the whitebalance setting.
That is basically how I deal with whitebalance, Silkypix has an excellent AWB and there is a skin balance tool which is really great.

In difficult conditions and when I have the time to do so I use my Expodisc which will give a very accurate white balance setting.

As a side note, just a thought regarding what white balance achieves. It gives us a neutral, accurate colour balance where grey is grey and white is white.

However, we might not always want that. How about glowing skin tones (81A filter on film) or the gorgeous reds of a fine sunset...AWB would try to "correct" these.

So for particulat effects I might use Cloudy setting (81A filter) or Daylight for the sunset and certainlt Tungsten for incandescent lighting where it is the only lighting.

So getting the white balance "right" isn't always best for the image. A fine example is the warm glow of the filters they use when filming "Doctor Who". Cardiff light isn't really that colour!