Agreed on the "incorrect" Wb - which is why one should never assume the camera has it correct. never-mind what setting you use.
White Balance
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Perhaps thinking too deeply about this, but sitting here imagining the earth as an orange, as one is wont to do, of course.
If the peel is our atmosphere and a needle is sunlight, then it all seems clear. At high noon the needle/sunlight is piercing the peel straight down. You get the scattering that makes the sky blue, giving what is illuminated below a slight blueish/cool cast.
As the day wears on the angle of the needle gets more and more steep, until it is piercing an awful lot of peel to reach us. Here the scattering is really a lot, making the sky above blue-er, but as the sun sets the parts toward and opposite the sun start to move around the color wheel. Yellow, then losing the yellow toward orange, then on to reddish, then violet, then maybe blue/black.
So what does it mean? As artists we can do what we want. Neutralize the whites, grays, and blacks, or emphasize the color cast of the evening or morning sky.
It's all good if we consciously decide it rather than it just happening to us.
If the peel is our atmosphere and a needle is sunlight, then it all seems clear. At high noon the needle/sunlight is piercing the peel straight down. You get the scattering that makes the sky blue, giving what is illuminated below a slight blueish/cool cast.
As the day wears on the angle of the needle gets more and more steep, until it is piercing an awful lot of peel to reach us. Here the scattering is really a lot, making the sky above blue-er, but as the sun sets the parts toward and opposite the sun start to move around the color wheel. Yellow, then losing the yellow toward orange, then on to reddish, then violet, then maybe blue/black.
So what does it mean? As artists we can do what we want. Neutralize the whites, grays, and blacks, or emphasize the color cast of the evening or morning sky.
It's all good if we consciously decide it rather than it just happening to us.
And then what shadows are doing is another subject. Sometimes we put our eyedropper on something is shadow but maybe we shouldn't. If the light is warm the illuminated part of a subject will lean warm, but the shadow part maybe not. If the shadow part is turning upward and lit by the sky it might be cool/bluish. If it is not facing up it might be influenced by reflected light or at least blocked from the blue sky, so it might be relatively warmer or neutral. I guess seeing is something we can work at our whole lives.
PhotoLover
Well-known member
I can definitely see sports photographers -- whom I understand may need to get the pictures out shortly after the event -- needing to get WB, exposure, etc as close as possible in camera.
But I find the Nikon auto white balance pretty good most of the time. And if it is not ... well, I move the slider in LR. And use sync settings to change a batch if necessary. Since I import and sort only in LR, a global WB change is very quick. As I'm mostly doing critters, messing with WB in the field would probably just cause me to miss shots.
PhotoLover
Well-known member
I kinda agree with the "subjective" view of WB. I'll change it to please my eye ... And every once in a while I'll tweak subject and background WB separately to get a "mood" or to emphasize the subject more.
But mostly, I take the in-camera WB. Not always.
I agree and I rely on auto daylight WB for almost all my shooting, at least for nature/wildlife work. I'll sometimes fix WB when shooting astrophotography and have used specific WB settings for indoor and artificial light shooting but for most nature and wildlife work I'm set to Auto Daylight WB and I agree the results are typically very good.
Just to say more about what white balance is or isn't, and to go farther into to weeds. Light from the sun before it hits the atmosphere from space has pretty much every frequency equally represented, so it has no color cast. A graph showing the distribution is flat from blue to green to red. When there is a color cast caused by passing through the atmosphere and certain frequencies getting more scattered than others all the frequencies are still there, so it still seems pretty white, except there is a little hump where the blues might bulge up or the reds or yellows or whatever. So maybe this is part of why we still perceive white even if the white is bulging a little blue or whatever. And why we can use the sliders to neutralize the cast.
lets imagine for a minute there was no changeable WB and it was fixed at eg 5600k. Would we be thinking about it? would we have thought about how we could change it? probably yes.
As have been said before, we change it / set in to suit our vision for an image. PS being so powerful, it just begs for it.
Perhaps this thread wakes up some ppl to pay more attention to the WB in future. if not to change it, perhaps to notice it.
As have been said before, we change it / set in to suit our vision for an image. PS being so powerful, it just begs for it.
Perhaps this thread wakes up some ppl to pay more attention to the WB in future. if not to change it, perhaps to notice it.
As in the thousands of 35mm and 2-1/4 square color film I exposed 45ish years ago
for those of us who grew up with digital
(see - I am still young)That film was white balanced. You could buy daylight or tungsten, and there were filters to correct if you had the wrong film for the light.
Mal Paso
Active member
And you can buy those Color Correction filters for pennies now.
Auto White Balance has saved me numerous times when shooting with skylight through the windows mixed with tungsten, LED and florescent and the LEDs are 3-6,000 K. I've had film shots under florescent that were impossible to fully correct. I think we are much better off now.
I will use Daylight more often now, this has been a good thread!
Yes, what a PITA it was to meter the balance at (usually) a guess and bother with the filters. I still have something around 30 - 77mm filters.
PhotoLover
Well-known member
So how do I decide what WB I like! Here is one shot of a Great Egret taken not too far from sunset; camera picked 4400 as the color temp.
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And then to make it more neutral, just move that slider to about 3800:
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I like the first better, then again, I look at the second one and kinda like the purer white ...
I like the first one better. Folks say color carries the emotional content and it has a much vibe. But hey they both are nice.
I'd say they're both nice but also both have quite a blue cast on the topside of the wings, especially the second shot.
Have you tried using the color eyedropper on a decently exposed (i.e. not blown out) white section to see what LR thinks is neutral. I don't usually use that as my final adjustment for nature shots but I often click on a white or gray neutral tone area as a starting point and then often warm the image a bit from that starting point. But having a neutral starting point based on making the white or gray tones neutral can help identify things like excessive magenta, green, blue or yellow casts and then adjust to taste once you've got a starting point.
Personally I'd probably try setting the whiter feathers to white, then adjust from there and I'd also probably try a bit of highlight recovery to pull back some feather detail in the breast area.
PhotoLover
Well-known member
I generally like the first one better also -- that golden look -- and it is what I saw in the field. But side by side, the purer white catches my eye. You could also do what Elsa mentions and only change the WB on the bird itself for more contrast. Plenty of choices.
PhotoLover
Well-known member
I hadn't spent much time on this picture, I just picked it because it seemed to illustrate a theme here on how you can tweak the WB to taste.
If I click on the feathers just above the legs, it likes it even bluer, 3400. If I click on left wingtip, it likes about 4000, which is what this pictures WB is. (I also dropped the exposure a bit as it is indeed blown out), so this version has some brightness changes as well. If I was presenting this picture, I would probably have left the WB as shot, and just worked on toning down the highlights and getting a bit more detail out of the feathers. It's just taste how much of that golden look you want on the bird.
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This will depend on if you want to show the bird as you saw it - 1st image - or if you want it to show corrected whites. For me the 4000 one hits the spot,
PhotoLover
Well-known member
It's taste and how close you to "reality" you want. And while my memory from that series of photos is that everything not shaded had quite the golden look .... even a few hours later, much less two years ... do I accurately remember color details? Probably not. It was the golden hour and that's all I know for sure.
Looking at all three again this morning I probably prefer the last image as well.
It's a little weird how the lightroom slider works. When you set a K number you are telling it what you think the ambient light is doing. For example if you had a light bulb rated at 3000 K that would be very warm orange-y light, and a light bulb rated at 6000 would send out cooler blue-ish light. But when you put the lightroom slider at 3000 you are saying you think the ambient light is warm/orange-ish, so lightroom corrects by cooling the image, moving it toward blue.
So in the bird above, it seems the side of the bird is exposed to warm light of golden hour, but the top of the wings are open to the cool light of blue sky or clouds. So maybe two separate adjustments if you don't want the top of the wings to be as cool.
How I do it by eye is maybe a little wonky. I move the slider left until it is strongly blue/purple then back to the right until that cast seems to just clear. I note that K number. Then I move the slider way right until I get a strong orangish cast, and then move back left until it just clears. I note that K number. So then I fiddle between those two numbers until it looks purty to my eye.
So in the bird above, it seems the side of the bird is exposed to warm light of golden hour, but the top of the wings are open to the cool light of blue sky or clouds. So maybe two separate adjustments if you don't want the top of the wings to be as cool.
How I do it by eye is maybe a little wonky. I move the slider left until it is strongly blue/purple then back to the right until that cast seems to just clear. I note that K number. Then I move the slider way right until I get a strong orangish cast, and then move back left until it just clears. I note that K number. So then I fiddle between those two numbers until it looks purty to my eye.
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I shoot a lot of sports indoors and outdoors and always establish a manual white balance setting for the participants on the playing service I am shooting. The auto white balance setting will adjust to the lighting that the camera sees but not necessarily the lighting that is illuminating the participants. I often shoot in situations where the playing court is consistently well lit but when following the action your camera's field of view may see all types of lighting like windows, advertising boards, score tables, and even video display boards all producing a different color temperature. The subject will primarily be illuminated by court lighting but the color temperature the camera will establish on auto WB might constantly be changing. It makes it a lot easier to adjust WB in post if WB is the same for the entire contest.
I photographed in one middle school gym where they had 3 different types on lighting spread across the playing service and one gym where it looked like they had made an effort to upgrade their lighting by updating every other light producing different color temperatures and different flicker frequencies. In both cases it was nearly impossible to create consistent color appearances in the images. My eyes did not notice a significant difference in the appearance of the color temperature in either gym but the cameras sure sees it..
When shooting outdoors, the camera white balance, like exposure, sees the light directed towards the camera, but the light illuminating the subject is coming from behind the camera. We can see the need to adjust exposure with strong back lighting but can't see changes in color temperature. This WB adjustment is easier to correct in post but sometimes it is difficult to reproduce what your eye saw at the time the images was captured.
I photographed in one middle school gym where they had 3 different types on lighting spread across the playing service and one gym where it looked like they had made an effort to upgrade their lighting by updating every other light producing different color temperatures and different flicker frequencies. In both cases it was nearly impossible to create consistent color appearances in the images. My eyes did not notice a significant difference in the appearance of the color temperature in either gym but the cameras sure sees it..
When shooting outdoors, the camera white balance, like exposure, sees the light directed towards the camera, but the light illuminating the subject is coming from behind the camera. We can see the need to adjust exposure with strong back lighting but can't see changes in color temperature. This WB adjustment is easier to correct in post but sometimes it is difficult to reproduce what your eye saw at the time the images was captured.
Figaro
New member
I was under the impression that our eyes adjust for white balance. Nature's auto white balance, which is why we adjust it in camera.
I think that is right, color constancy I think it's called. For example if we are in a room lit by warm light bulbs a white piece of paper will still look white to our eyes but it really has the orangish cast from the warm light bulbs. It's cool to go outside and cover one eye for 5 minutes then switch eyes and see how the color seems to have a cast to it.
Good food for thought. I'll give it a try.