Dynax Digital Forums

Is there a advantage to always setting the white balance off these cards?

No- it is only money making! You can use any grey card or white card to set you white balance and you can get a sturdy one in any school supply shop. Which card you use is not the issue but how you use it!
a) You need to use it each time when the light changes - ever so slightly
b) If shooting a portrait with more than one light source make sure you sitter holds it right in front of her/his face.
c) Alternatively: just include the grey/white card in you first shot and then later on you can use this one image in your raw converter to set the proper white balance by using the eye dropper tool.

IMHO all these wb "toys" you can buy are real money making machines and you really don't need to buy them!
Stef.

I'll offer the opposing view. I bought a whibal and find it well worth the expense in certain situations. In the rainforest for example there is always going to be a colour cast. I shoot RAW always. A single shot with the card in view and my colour correction issues are resolved.

Any time there is a situation with a tricky colour cast, I now have a tool to easily deal with it.

http://www.rawworkflow.com/whibal/

Setting custom white balance though is a different story. The manual advises using a white or neutral subject. A dedicated card should not be required for this situation.

Hi, I use my A300 set on the "daylight" setting most of the time. Why? well because when I used to shoot with 35mm film, most of the film I could buy readily was daylight balanced, in other words, if you take a photo indoors without flash, the result under tungsten lighting (ordinary household bulbs) would come out looking a bit orange. Under flourescent lighting, (energy saving bulbs fall into this catergory) the results would come out a bit bluey green. My point is, if you get used to using a particular setting, whether that be daylight, tungsten etc, you will start to get experience of what colour cast that setting will produce. If you use the "auto white balance" setting, you really need to know where to take a white balance reading from, before you start shooting. The beauty of digital though is that you can correct colour casts so easily that it needn't be a major problem. A little bit of reading about colour temprature would be an advantage to anyone new to photography.

While that's true to a point, leaving the white balance on daylight and assuming you can correct it in post production will not get as good a result as getting the white balance right when you take the shot. RAW processing can do a great deal, but there are limits.

It's a common misconception that having the white balance mis-set can be completely corrected in RAW. It can be largely corrected, but not completely.

Fother, I disagree, that white balance can't be corrected, if we compared results in a lab you may be right, but in the real world, most people would not be able to distinguish a "corrected" image from a "correct" image. If you used film cameras then you probably used filters at the shooting stage and if you developed your own images you probably used all sorts of tricks to correct colour casts. There is no such thing as perfect white balance, just as there was never such as thing as perfect film. My point is that if you stick to one particular white balance setting, you can learn from that base, if however we trust the cameras auto white balance there will always be a "unknown variable".

Cheers

Kev

Kev / jesseclarke

that's fine, but please don't misconstrue what I said - I was not arguing to use AWB, but to actually set an appropriate white balance for the circumstances you're shooting in. I never use AWB, and I wouldn't use the daylight white balance setting in flash or tungsten conditions. I use either specific colour temperatures, or at the very least the basic white balance modes - tungsten, flash, etc etc - though generally with some adjustment up or down on them.

Sure, you can adjust back in post processing, but it has an impact on the dynamic range of the image. Not enough to make the images unusable for most purposes, but it does reduce your options to some degree (Some time ago there was a thread posted here that demonstrated this - feel free to browse back for it if interested). Whether that matters in the 'real world' depends what your 'real world' use is, I guess.    For me, when someone pays me for a service I think it's my job to get the details right to the best of my ability - naything less and I'm cheating them, and ultimately, my business


Edit: Stef responded while I was writing this - I believe she's referring to the same older thread I am

Yeah I read that with some interest.

'I never use it' not 'In have never used it' -- I've played with it at times for experimentation, but I find my results better controlled when I manage my white balance (and ISO and so on...) carefully. I can understand the appeal of other approaches, but as I said, depends what your real world use is for . I also want to use the method that's most time efficient. For me, it takes me less time to adjust white balance on the camera than it does to adjust it in post processing. Others may find the opposite

Ronnie: there are two ways of doing this and one is better than the other:
1. to set a custom white balance is the better method. For this you need to spot focus on a white piece of paper and the push the shutter release button. Each time the light changes ever so slightly you would have to do this again!

2. Second method: include a grey card into your first image. If it is a portrait than ask the subject to hold the grey card in front of her face and not somewhere else. You can then use this grey card in your raw converter to set the correct wb. Be aware there will be a difference in dynamic range as Fother explained.

Fother- yes I referred to the same article.

zekewhipper- I agree with Fother. I have read you article with interest but do have some doubts which I would like to verify before uttering an opinion. One of the doubts/ questions I have is: a filter is to some extent always degrading image quality (to some extent!) I have very good and expensive lenses and I am wondering what happens if I put a relatively cheap filter in front of it. I think it would be worthwhile trying a macro shot with this set up as the sharpness in macro is crucial. I also want to see what a filter does to the dynamic range of the image. Sony's cameras are quite "famous" for their dynamic range and I would not want anything to come in that way.
Nevertheless, your method is indeed very interesting and worth exploring. So thanks for sharing it with us.
Stef.