My way with WB

[tobey bilek]

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I bought a WhiBal card last year.

 

Then use your old RC paper drying rack to hold your large color checker with the WhiBal card covering the middle grey squares.

 

On a nice sunny day, do a custom WB on the WhiBal and then do a total picture of the set up filling the frame.

 

The advantage of WhiBal custom wb and other devices is it also calibrates

the green-magenta in addition to the blue yellow. Unlike Nikon, Leica has no way to set a K temp and have green-magenta adjust also.

 

When you put the file into ACR or Lightroom, the WhiBal reads even on all three of RGB values as does both white and black on the color checker.

 

You may remember these color temp setting and apply them as an ACR preset for future pics taken under the same conditions or save as a profile in the camera. One could also make a profile for custom WB for shade, cloudy, tungsten etc should you wish. Nikon allows me to keep multiple custom wb in the camera without using a profile slot.

 

The M9 makes beautiful colors and the sunny day wb in ACR is 5250 and plus 2 magenta. A Kelvin of 5250 should be close enough

 

The M8 has always been a problem and when I set it up even using the filters and coding and I discovered why. Same conditions, the wb is 5750 and plus 21 magenta. This is with the lens coded and B+W 486 filter in place. The nice blue sky is still contaminated with some green so I reduced that with hue, saturation, lightness tab, and got a nicer blue that closely matches the M9. All that saved with a preset in ACR

 

I am sure an Expo Disk or other tools will do the same. The WhiBal card has black and white areas if you do not have a color checker.

 

Thorsten Overgard uses one also and he explains how on his site. He does not work as hard as I , he simply wastes an exposure for each set up.

[lct]

I have no WB problems with my M8.2 and IR-cut filters but i use Capture One. FWIW.