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Auto White Balance, Nature and why not to do it!

jonoslack

Active member
Hi There
This post is just to establish my situation as a nutter in irrevocable terms!
Some may have been amused / bored / irritated by the discussion on this in the Thanks to Rob thread.
Rob - if you're reading this, thank you again.
I have a distinct feeling that I wasn't making myself clear - hopefully these samples will help - I should note that I'm not writing off AWB in all situations, but I think it's unhelpful for landscape.

In each case the left hand shot has been taken with 'daylight' WB (4891K -5 tint). The right hand shot has been taken with AWB - I've noted the wb for each below:


Daylight Left, AWB: 6414 tint 4


Daylight Left, AWB: 6372 tint 2


Daylight Left, AWB: 6026 tint 3


Daylight Left, AWB: 6105 tint 1


Daylight Left, AWB: 4181 tint 4


Daylight Left, AWB: 4199 tint 3


Daylight Left, AWB: 4254 tint 7

In the 38 pairs of shots I took, the AWB went from:

4075 - 6428, the tint from -22 to +16 - (n.b. the fact that the AWB seems to be getting cooler as time goes on is misleading - the spread was actually fairly evenly diverse)

In almost every case the 'daylight' gave a more realistic representation of the scene, and in the first couple of shots the AWB has the nasty yellow cast which I had hated so much with Nikon.

So, to my point.

1. There may be no 'correct' White balance in situations like this, but if you use AWB, then your colour balance is going to slew considerably from hot to cold - if you process the pictures 1/2 hour after taking them, then this is obvious, if you process them 3 days later you're unlikely to remember exactly what the colour was like anyway.

2. Fixing a white balance (in this case daylight) is, as Rob put in his revelatory message, is like using slide film - you KNOW WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO GET, and you can understand the results. You also have a sensible starting point from which to work. Of course, you could take a grey card reading when you start and use that . . . but it'll change from shoot to shoot, and it's still only going to be arbitrary (incidentally, I took a grey card and the dog urinated on it before the first shot!).

3. The AWB on the Nikon is prone to give too warm results with a yellow cast in evening light (you might feel that's my opinion).

Sorry if this just seems like Slack banging his greens drum again!

We all learn about white balance, we develop procedures to use it, but I think most people really haven't thought about the situation in mixed outdoor lighting - and I've seen very little written about it, the common mantras about grey cards and macbeth chards come up - and they really don't meet the case!

If this has made one person think a little, then it's been worthwhile!
 

Terry

New member
Thanks Jono,
I need to change around and try the daylight in white balance. The very first day I had the D300 I posted about the AWB as I was shooting side with my M8. The M8 was also on AWB but the values I was getting from the M8 were in a tight group whereas the D300 was much more varied and we very cool. What is interesting is how little we talk about tint. I loook toward to having another look at this thread on a good screen at home.
 

Steen

Senior Subscriber Member
Thanks Jono, now I shall try to stay serious :eek:
All jokes aside, your investigations have been very useful for me, because finally I realize that I don't understand what is going on in a built in camera WB meter.
Does it meter the light-source-light or the reflected colour temp so to say ?
And is a specific Kelvin value an absolute thing or a relative one with regards to impact on the colors in a photo. And are there other factors at play in the resulting color renderings ? I'm no longer so sure.
So maybe I end up buying one of those Sekonic Colormeter C-500, then some day I might understand what's going on, and be able to control it better.
With such a one I don't even need to take any pictures, I can just meter all day long :D
http://www.ephotozine.com/article/Sekonic-Prodigi-C500-and-C500R-Colour-Meters
 

jonoslack

Active member
Thanks Jono, now I shall try to stay serious :eek:
All jokes aside, your investigations have been very useful for me, because finally I realize that I don't understand what is going on in a built in camera WB meter.
Does it meter the light-source-light or the reflected colour temp so to say ?
And is a specific Kelvin value an absolute thing or a relative one with regards to impact on the colors in a photo. And are there other factors at play in the resulting color renderings ? I'm no longer so sure.
So maybe I end up buying one of those Sekonic Colormeter C-500, then some day I might understand what's going on, and be able to control it better.
Thank you Steen (not that I need to be taken seriously of course):)

I think that most people really do think that there is a 'correct' white balance for a particular picture. This may be the case in a controlled lighting situation where one is actually trying to reproduce colours in absolute terms.

In nature, you aren't ever going to get controlled lighting, and if you take an 'ambient' WB in a shady area it will vary vastly from that in a sunny area. The AWB in the camera is trying to take a view on this - evening light is especially problematical, as the real sunlight is so warm, whereas the shadows are really cool.

Add to this the problem that when we look at a scene, we do selective WB corrections for different areas (generally speaking if you see a piece of white paper in tungsten light or in sunlight then your eyes tell you it's white).

Then you need to add the fact that for a landscape photographer, you don't even want to correct for colour temperature - if you do a grey card in evening light, (assuming the dog hasn't pissed on it first) then you'll get rid of your evening light.

Guy might say "well, you can do anything you want then", but for me, I want to represent the light as closely as possible to the way I saw it (I have to hope that others will see it the same way - but let's not go there!).

I've brought this subject up a number of times over the last year or so, and generally speaking I seem to get rubbished or 'glossed over'. For me it's important stuff.

With the D3 (and also the M8, but I was already doing that), the answer is to shoot always with 'Daylight' 'Cloudy' or 'Tungsten'. It's remarkable how good it gets it, but if the worst comes to the worst, at least you have one fixed 'variable' to work from
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Steen that is part of the issue it takes it's reading off of what is reflected and not what is falling. So it is guessing and in this case with green foilage it is getting fooled . Reason why setting it to daylight is it will always render 5500 kelvin. Every shot will say 5500 kelvin so with a daylight setting think of it more in terms of the light falling on the subject not reflected and this is exactly what is happening to Jono. On AWB it's reading the green and taking a guess and in many cases it is wrong if you set it to 5500 kelvin in camera or daylight the camera say okay the scene will render daylight temp. Now it maybe warmer out at sunset and such and will render the color but the color will be cleaner because the camera is saying daylight to itself and no tint get's involved from reading off the scene.

Maybe a good analogy is a reflected light meter and a incident light meter . A incident will read the light falling on the subject (input daylight setting for color) and a reflected meter reading will set itself to the light reflect( input color reflected here). They kind of work the same way
 

cmb_

Subscriber & Workshop Member
Jono,

Interesting to see and thank you for posting.

For completeness, it might be interesting to state the approximate time of day for the shots. Also, which RAW converter.
 

jonoslack

Active member
Jono,

Interesting to see and thank you for posting.

For completeness, it might be interesting to state the approximate time of day for the shots. Also, which RAW converter.
HI Chris

Pictures were taken between 6.20 and 6.50
Converted using default values in Aperture with no corrections for exposure or white balance
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Now to add the images on the right maybe exactly what you want and the good base than you can fine tune the warm in with the kelvin slider . Now the tint is correct so you can bounce to get the feel you want but now you are on a good base.
 

jonoslack

Active member
Steen that is part of the issue it takes it's reading off of what is reflected and not what is falling. So it is guessing and in this case with green foilage it is getting fooled . Reason why setting it to daylight is it will always render 5500 kelvin. Every shot will say 5500 kelvin so with a daylight setting think of it more in terms of the light falling on the subject not reflected and this is exactly what is happening to Jono. On AWB it's reading the green and taking a guess and in many cases it is wrong if you set it to 5500 kelvin in camera or daylight the camera say okay the scene will render daylight temp. Now it maybe warmer out at sunset and such and will render the color but the color will be cleaner because the camera is saying daylight to itself and no tint get's involved from reading off the scene.

Maybe a good analogy is a reflected light meter and a incident light meter . A incident will read the light falling on the subject (input daylight setting for color) and a reflected meter reading will set itself to the light reflect( input color reflected here). They kind of work the same way
HI Guy
A couple of points
1.
Does the D3 not have an incident white balance meter? (I know the Olympus E1 and E2 DO have one). I've been looking around and can't find out.
2.
The Daylight setting on the D3 is 4891 with a tint of -5 (FWIW) it comes up the same in ACR and Aperture.
 

jonoslack

Active member
Now to add the images on the right maybe exactly what you want and the good base than you can fine tune the warm in with the kelvin slider . Now the tint is correct so you can bounce to get the feel you want but now you are on a good base.
Hi Guy
I don't understand what you're saying here - the images on the right are all awful.
 
V

Van

Guest
Thank you

You did a nice evaluation, your effort is appreciated by me.

And I agree, not too many talk about it, and you are right. I have on occasions, even asked sales persons about the Nikon green/yellows and they do not acknowledge it.

Can you achieve a better WB in PP, or is it a better result to select sunlight, cloudy etc at the shot? Did you try to dial in the K temp?

Also, what about WB bracketing, will that not assist?

I need to ask one more, I hope this does not sound ridiculous , but what do you mean when you note in your post, the tint readings, i.e. -4?

Much appreciated... Van




Thank you Steen (not that I need to be taken seriously of course):)

I think that most people really do think that there is a 'correct' white balance for a particular picture. This may be the case in a controlled lighting situation where one is actually trying to reproduce colours in absolute terms.

In nature, you aren't ever going to get controlled lighting, and if you take an 'ambient' WB in a shady area it will vary vastly from that in a sunny area. The AWB in the camera is trying to take a view on this - evening light is especially problematical, as the real sunlight is so warm, whereas the shadows are really cool.

Add to this the problem that when we look at a scene, we do selective WB corrections for different areas (generally speaking if you see a piece of white paper in tungsten light or in sunlight then your eyes tell you it's white).

Then you need to add the fact that for a landscape photographer, you don't even want to correct for colour temperature - if you do a grey card in evening light, (assuming the dog hasn't pissed on it first) then you'll get rid of your evening light.

Guy might say "well, you can do anything you want then", but for me, I want to represent the light as closely as possible to the way I saw it (I have to hope that others will see it the same way - but let's not go there!).

I've brought this subject up a number of times over the last year or so, and generally speaking I seem to get rubbished or 'glossed over'. For me it's important stuff.

With the D3 (and also the M8, but I was already doing that), the answer is to shoot always with 'Daylight' 'Cloudy' or 'Tungsten'. It's remarkable how good it gets it, but if the worst comes to the worst, at least you have one fixed 'variable' to work from
 

LCT

Member
I must be missing something but can't you choose WB settings you need in your raw converter? Or do you shoot jpegs perhaps?
 

jonoslack

Active member
I must be missing something but can't you choose WB settings you need in your raw converter? Or do you shoot jpegs perhaps?
Of course you can, (and of course these were shot RAW), but why would you want to import a batch of photographs where not a single one had either correct, or the same white balance? Added to which - how do you know what was right when you import photographs an hour/day/week later?

If you use a fixed white balance, you get to understand the colours of the camera, and how you can / should amend them - if every batch you get has the sort of wild variations I'm alluding to above, you don't have a decent place to start from.
 

jonoslack

Active member
Re: Thank you

Hi Van
You did a nice evaluation, your effort is appreciated by me.

And I agree, not too many talk about it, and you are right. I have on occasions, even asked sales persons about the Nikon green/yellows and they do not acknowledge it.


Irritating isn't it - it's actually why I stopped using Nikon a couple of years ago and moved to Olympus (which has fine colour) and Leica.

Can you achieve a better WB in PP, or is it a better result to select sunlight, cloudy etc at the shot? Did you try to dial in the K temp?
Well, you can (and I do) change it in PP as required, but it seems to me that the camera actually does a fine job if you set it to direct sunlight and then use that as a base to work from

Also, what about WB bracketing, will that not assist?
Well, of course you can, but they you are back to having to make an evaluation on an image by image basis at some later time, without the scene in front of you any more.

I need to ask one more, I hope this does not sound ridiculous , but what do you mean when you note in your post, the tint readings, i.e. -4?
The white balance value is made up of two components - the colour temperature and the tint - if you're using ACR or Lightroom or Aperture (and other converters I'm sure) then the tint value is given (and can be changed)
 
V

Van

Guest
Re: Thank you

Got it. I knew it was something like you mentioned, the tint in LR. I just did not remember that slider.

Another thought I just had... if you used the live view, I wonder... if this will give you the D3's interpretation of the scene's WB, and then you can dial in the Kelvin or whatever...



Hi Van


Irritating isn't it - it's actually why I stopped using Nikon a couple of years ago and moved to Olympus (which has fine colour) and Leica.


Well, you can (and I do) change it in PP as required, but it seems to me that the camera actually does a fine job if you set it to direct sunlight and then use that as a base to work from



Well, of course you can, but they you are back to having to make an evaluation on an image by image basis at some later time, without the scene in front of you any more.



The white balance value is made up of two components - the colour temperature and the tint - if you're using ACR or Lightroom or Aperture (and other converters I'm sure) then the tint value is given (and can be changed)
 
V

Van

Guest
Magenta

Have you noticed, at times, too much magenta in portrait shots? I have, in both Raw and Jpeg. Did you find a different WB selection for that?

Hi Van


Irritating isn't it - it's actually why I stopped using Nikon a couple of years ago and moved to Olympus (which has fine colour) and Leica.


Well, you can (and I do) change it in PP as required, but it seems to me that the camera actually does a fine job if you set it to direct sunlight and then use that as a base to work from



Well, of course you can, but they you are back to having to make an evaluation on an image by image basis at some later time, without the scene in front of you any more.



The white balance value is made up of two components - the colour temperature and the tint - if you're using ACR or Lightroom or Aperture (and other converters I'm sure) then the tint value is given (and can be changed)
 
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