M8 - Sudden shift of Auto White balance

[msole]

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I sometimes experience a shift in white balance (setting is on Auto) while taking the identical shot several times. One picture looks well balanced and the next has a blue hue, as if the auto balance suddently switched itself to balance to a different light source. Has anyone experienced this?

[Guest guy_mancuso]

Yes the AWB get's lost sometimes. Nothing wrong with the camera . This happens when the AWB is reading the wrong color temp in a scene and really just gets confused.

[RSL]

Nothing wrong with the camera?

[de dirk]

this shift happened today, right when i was showing of my camera to a canon mark II user. he was convinced he had the best camera..

[Skippy Sanchez]

I sometimes experience a shift in white balance (setting is on Auto) while taking the identical shot several times. One picture looks well balanced and the next has a blue hue, as if the auto balance suddently switched itself to balance to a different light source. Has anyone experienced this?

 

Yeah, it happens from time to time. It has happened on virtually every digital camera I've used in the past 12 years, including the M8.

 

Does it happen a lot? If not, it's probably no big deal.

 

Usually I've experienced it under fluorescent light, because fluorescent tubes cycle in output & color several times a second. It also seems to be somewhat random--and infrequent-- under all sorts of light, but never to the point that it couldn't be easily corrected.

 

When I was shooting color film, the filter pack on the enlarger had to be occasionally tweaked between one frame and another, even though the film was exposed under the same lighting conditions.

 

I've never been concerned with it, but if you are, i'd suggest shooting raw files, which are much easily tweaked than jpegs.

 

just my humble opinion....

-skippy

[ken_tanaka]

Nothing wrong with the camera?

 

Well, at least nothing unknown.

 

Indeed, the M8's white balance detection system is rather primitive at this point. My M8 only seems to know two auto white balance settings; one at around 5900K and the other around 3800K. It most frequently makes misjudgments when faced with cloudy or flat scenes. For example, I've been shooting a series in very foggy conditions recently. Predicting the camera's shot-to-shot white balance is rather like shooting craps and adds a certain extra thrill to the work.

 

I've heard that fixing this issue is in the very long list of tasks due in the next firmware release. We'll see,

[ho_co]

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See item #7 under http://www.leica-camera-user.com/digital-forum/20079-official-response-leica-laundry-list.html#post212897 :

"Leica is aware that the AWB needs to be improved. Improving the current AWB algorithms did not prove to be a promising way to come to a satisfactory result. Therefore Leica is working on a new setup of algorithms to come to a reliable AWB function. Intensive tests have still to be made, therefore we cannot give a specific launch date at this time."

[tom0511]

One thing I was told by Leica is that Nikon and Canon cameras use kind of a memory - if you shoot several images the white belance of the previous images is included in the algorithm for the next image. This leads to more consistentcy between several images.

The M8, (thats what he told me) has a different approach-the white balance of previous images is not taken into account. A small change of the light/subject can lead to very different WB between 2 images.

If the AWB would be moreprecise, the change should not be as much as it is today (IMO).

regards, tom

[losta]

The same thing happens to me maybe once every 30 or 40 shots. It's always blue, at least it's easy to see immediately. That and the magenta blacks are the only issue I have had with my M8. I am waiting until late spring to send it back to Solms.

[glenerrolrd]

I sometimes experience a shift in white balance (setting is on Auto) while taking the identical shot several times. One picture looks well balanced and the next has a blue hue, as if the auto balance suddently switched itself to balance to a different light source. Has anyone experienced this?

Isn t this the same flaw that the DMR exhibits. If you shoot a sequence on AWB , the first image is balanced (AWB) but the images after are not ....resulting in the "Blue" look. Easy to test . The solution is to use manual white balance...quick image of any white or neutral item ..will get you close and will remain consistently throughout your shoot. . I have a large (77MM) Expo disc that I just point at the light source and hold over the lens hood. The other alternative is to include a WhiBal image and batch adjust in post processing. I have tried all three methods ..I like the Expo Disc best because it gives me a realistic view of the light in my initial viewing of the shoot.

[spylaw4]

I was taking some flower shots this morning with the L1 and I notice the same thing happening on Auto WB.

[msole]

Thanks for all the responses to my White Balance query! It's interesting to hear that this is not unusual.

 

Just to clarify: if I take 10 shots of the exact same thing (using C), only one of the images (anywhere in the batch) looks blue. So not the whole sequence is affected. Also it happens quite often, it's not an infrequent occurence. And to make it more strange, it happens more often with the 28mm lens then with the 50mm lens. It also only has happened since I installed the new software update.

 

I'm glad to hear that this does not happen when the white balalance is set manually, I will test that next under similar conditions.

 

It seems to me that this is a software glitch that could be remedied if Leica were to put better ressources into their programming efforts. One would think that reproduction of color is their core business, and not some side thing that is last on the list.

 

Of course one can always manually adjust everything afterwards. But why should I have to do that with a professional camera? Whitebalance is rudimentary!

[grober]

Yup, I've seen it and really scratched my head the first time.

 

My answer: buy a WhiBal card and shoot (in the?) RAW. The card just arrived yesterday; ordered it on Monday. I'm now learning how to include a shot of the WhiBal card in the representative lighting environments of each day's shoot. Then, at least, we can determine a color standard when the images are processed (probably in C1) after the day's shooting. Yeah, AWB currently is all over the place in the M8. (Waiting for firmware release 1.10...)

 

Exactly what I feared about going 100% digital is now happening: too much time hunched over the bloody keyboard. But there's no going back now is there?

 

-g

[msole]

I actually just found an interesting write-up by Robin Myers on the use of white versus grey cards to establish white balance. Here is a quote:

 

"A white card does have its uses for digital photography when used to set the exposure. In the days of film photography, an 18% reflective gray card was used to set the exposure. It was not used to set the neutral balance because that was built into the film by the manufacturer. These days, digital cameras do not set the exposure with a gray card, instead they use the gray to set the neutral balance. Exposing the white card then checking the image histogram is an effective way to use a white card to make sure highlight detail is not lost."

 

Here is the link to the write-up:

http://rmimaging.com/information/gray_or_white.html

 

Somebody ealier also mentioned the Expo Disk. I ordered one, and want to compare it to the common "grey card".

 

Is there anyone out there who uses a white card to calibrate the detail in the highlights? I haven't done that and I'm curious to see if it is useful. I'm also not clear on the how-to-do-it.

 

Thanks!

[Guest guy_mancuso]

Don't use the old 18 percent grey cards . There not really neutral grey but have a blue cast to them

[Guest sirvine]

Unless you're shooting JPGs, it's easy to ignore Leica's AWB. Just set the camera's white balance to one setting (e.g., flourescent) and then run the DNGs through ACR/Lightroom/whatever-RAW-convertor and use the RAW convertor's autoWB function for "development" of the DNGs.

 

Other than chimping, I never notice the Leica WB.

[Iron Flatline]

Bah, my Canon 5D does it too sometimes. The 5D is supposed to have the best AWB of all the cameras out there, except possibly now the 1DmkIII. The point is that the little computer that we call camera just ends up reading something in an odd way. Fortunately I shoot RAW, so it's not quite that big a deal, but still.... grrr.