Strange White Balance Issue

[innerimager]

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I shot a wedding last weekend with the M9 and a D3. I had done a custom balance for the M9 doing tungsten light dressing/preparations. The next series of images that I used the M9 for was in bright daylight as the couple left the limo. I set WB for "daylight". When I opened the raw files, they were quite blue, as if the K value had still been in the 2500 tungsten range. The K value given in the converter (both Raw Developer and C1) was around 5100. Click balancing gave a K of 60,000 (!) but produced correct WB and good colors. Here's an example of an uncorrected image out of camera. Any ideas what's going on? best....Peter

 

[Nicoleica]

Perhaps this was caused by the large expanses of white from the car and gown reflecting light from the clear (And cold looking.) blue sky?

[adan]

They may be in "daylight", but they are also in shade, lit only by that great big blue reflector called the sky. This is clear from the lack of shadows and the obvious time of day and location as seen in the limo window reflections.

 

Skylight-only can easily get way up into the 5-digits for color temperature, although the highest i've seen is usually no more than 12,000K.

 

The number seems high, but the image you post is exactly how I'd expect an uncorrected sky-lit shot to look - blue.

 

In film days, we would have used a "skylight" or an 81A/B/C yellowish filter to correct for this.

 

And just to check - you do realize that setting white balance in the camera (whether manually or automatically) has NO effect whatever on RAW images (unless you use the "As Shot" option when setting WB in C1 or Raw Developer). That's one of the reasons for shooting raw - you are not locked in to a specific yellow or blue or neutral tint until YOU process the image.

_________

 

Edit - on partly cloudy days with big puffy clouds as part of the sky lighting, the sky light is more neutral because it is partly white reflectors as well as blue. But your shot looks to be a crisp late fall day with only a few high cirrus clouds to soften that crystalline blue. Low sun angle (late in the day, or actually, most of the day in the North in Winter) also bumps up the blue quotient.

[innerimager]

Thanks to both of you, I think you have explained it. It was an absolutely cloudless, extremely bright blue sky! Andy- I am aware of the Raw issues, and was using "as shot" of course they did correct perfectly. best....Peter

[adan]

Yeah - it's interesting that a clear day (in shade) can actually be far bluer than an overcast day, espcially if the overcast has a little smog mixed in to yellow things up.

[kingsley244]

Thanks to the 2nd and 3rd posters. I learnt something useful from them.