How do you controll your white balance ?

[Guest Olof]

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is the good old Kodak white balance card still usable, or are there better products today ?

[cldp]

The WhiBal card comes is several sizes, works well and is readily available.

[cldp]

And, it's durable.

[carstenw]

The Kodak card is apparently 18% grey, but not really grey, so I would recommend looking for something more neutral, like the WhiBal.

[Frank Sprow]

In shooting DNG's, I just leave the M8 white balance on Auto, and then adjust (extremely easy) in Adobe Lightroom using the dropper or other controls.

[wparsonsgisnet]

The WhiBal card is precisely neutral in all three colors and they check each batch of cards for accuracy. The sleeve it comes in contains its report card (the results of the calibration test).

 

Others here like the white thingy that fits over the lens.

 

If you can position the card so that it sees the same color light as the subject, that's cool; if you can point the lens thingy at a balanced "gray," that's cool.

 

You can shoot raw and include a shot of the WhiBal card everytime you change lighting. Two of the sizes of their cards fit in the pocket. They even offer what seems like a catalog-full of accessories: lanyards, clips, etc.

 

Go to the site and watch the video. Nifty.

 

The famous Kodak Gray Card is not neutral.

 

There is a problem of course: operator head space error. I keep forgetting to take the thing out of the camera bag and shoot it.

[harmsr]

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Auto WB on the M8 only seems to do well outside under natural lighting. Mixed lighting and artificial light seem to confuse it.

 

I normally do one of two things:

 

• Set on daylight and fix in post processing.
  
• Use the Exposdisc and set a manual white balance.
  

 

Either one of these works very well.

 

Best,

 

Ray

[scott kirkpatrick]

Auto WB in the present firmware seems only capable of suggesting a color temperature, and it only knows three of those, roughly 3500K, 5500k, and 7400K. I hope we will see something more smoothly varying someday soon. It would be even better if it could estimate mixed lighting as well as many DSLRs do, but I have my doubts about the abilities of the M8's one internal sensor, assisted by the blue dot, to make those distinctions. The presets all appear to be pure color temperature settings. "Manual" white balance requires that you take a picture of a neutral surface, and then the firmware can separate r, g, and b information, compare their intensities and do all sorts of subtle stuff.

 

scott