white balance wrong

[stump4545]

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was shooting at night with wb set to Florescent and now my pics look strange.

 

is this totally fixable in aperture 3 or is the image never the same as if it was taken accurately?

[Bill W]

I always shoot white balance on auto and raw. I can adjust in post but I use Photoshop, not sure about Aperture 3 since I have never used it.

[*j-w-m*]

Easy to fix. Aperture has a little eyedropper in the temperature adjustments that allows you to click on something white or gray in the scene and it will bring the color temp much closer to accurate. Or you can manually change the color temp to the setting that looks best.

[Fgcm]

If you give me a mail address, I send you a file to set in Aperture 3 the right presets for original M9 BW values.

 

Franco

[jaapv]

Errr... if you shot raw, just adjust your whitebalance by the tools in your program, like you should do on many of your shots. Doesn't Aperture have an "auto" button for whitebalance?

Whitebalance is just a setting in raw conversion which does not affect the data in your raw file.

[thighslapper]

On the current aperture version the AUTO white balance works very well.... and there are 3 algorithms to choose from that all yield subtely different results.

 

Unlike the previous versions it's pretty difficult to improve on the auto result. In mixed light settings using the 'eye dropper' can produce some odd results ...... at twilight with some residual light+streetlights everything ends up green using this method ...

[digitalpowershot]

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Use a WhiBal card. Perfect colors.

[1JB]

Depending on the light something is always going to be off. If you correct for the yellow cast of an incadescent bulb your whites will look blue for example. That's because the light going through the light shade actaully does have a yellow cast unless you use a special bulb. Even using a white balance card won't correct all of the issues. You have to do the best you can with what you have under varying lighting so shoot raw and learn to spot correct in post processing. The human eye is a lot better at correcting white balance than a digital sensor. Sometimes there's not much you can do short of using a flash.

[Luke_Miller]

Mixed lighting can be a real pain. One of the features I really appreciate in Lightroom 4 is that you can use the white balance tools on a layer. So, using a gradient or brushed in layer, you can have different white balance settings in different parts of an image. I find it a really useful capability for mixed lighting shots.

[stump4545]

if shooting in outside daylight with the m9 set to daylight will white balance always be spot on or for real critical work is it best to always correct it before post processing further?

[wparsonsgisnet]

Ditto for Jaap's comment: always shoot RAW (of Raw plus something, if you can take the functional loss of speed in the camera).

 

RAW is the gods gift to photographers. Color fix? Done, More light? Done. More ... ? Done.

 

Also, who knows what wonders will arrive in x years. A raw file may be able to be turned into the real thing. Gives one hope as regards post processing for music recordings: We may be able to fix 2 decades of bad digital recordings and make 78's sound like modern recordings.

 

Your camera is what it eats, just like we are.

[hoppyman]

No,.... well maybe...but..... and every camera is the same.

It depends on what you consider is 'spot on'.

Do you mean exactly what the ambient colour temperature actually was (assuming you had a single illuminant source perfect scene)?

That will only be true in one theoretical circumstance and that is so for any fixed WB value of course. The real world does not work in 100 degree K increments .

 

Remember too that your brain processes the information from your eyes and is good at seeing 'white' as white when it isn't white. Take away that context and you see the real 'white' as it was recorded, within your capture limitations. Also where you have dominant blocs of colour or tone your perception of adjacent areas changes too. Don't forget all of the other factors eg. shade, reflections etc.

 

However the important thing is (as others have said here) is that you can alter that value as much as you like after the fact with no penalty from raw files.

 

Generally it is a good practice (assuming you are happy with the camera profile) to set your white balance in developing before editing exposure or contrast etc. Once again though one of the great strengths of raw is that you can change your mind as often as you like after the fact (and that's a great way to learn what you prefer too of course).

 

Whatever your camera records, be it a set fixed value or an auto selection, can provide the useful starting point in developing.

I recommend AWB in camera. In my experience it gives good, natural looking results as my starting point in the whole range of daylight conditions. Mixed lighting (interiors with artificial light sources included) is a different circumstance, as also mentioned earlier in the thread.

 

if shooting in outside daylight with the m9 set to daylight will white balance always be spot on or for real critical work is it best to always correct it before post processing further?