White balance

thebaz

I've been using my camera in non auto mode , recently , mainly using A setting , but sometimes at S . Can anyone tell me when White balance should be set , i have it set at auto , but are there any conditions when it is really benificial to set , as there seams to be settings for all conditions - cloud, flash , shade flourescent etc .
Cheers.

Dimy

If you can shoot in RAW on your camera, you don't need to set the white balance at all, you can do this afterwards with software like Rawshooter or the Adobe Raw plug-in for Photoshop.

What camera (make/model) do you have?

bp_me

Im using a Fuji S9500 and find it deals well with most lights until they move to the red/orange part of the spectrum. In this case a custom w/b would need to be set. I mostly gave up shooting in anything but RAW a while back, so this isnt something I worry about. Though it is interesting to compare the camera's reading to how I want it to look. Sometimes its bang on. Other times it's way off. As I said, it seems to depend on the light temperature.

thebaz

Dimy wrote:

If you can shoot in RAW on your camera, you don't need to set the white balance at all, you can do this afterwards with software like Rawshooter or the Adobe Raw plug-in for Photoshop.

What camera (make/model) do you have?

Its a nikon d 50 , havn't been shooting RAW , yet !

Just wondered was there any particular situation when pre-setting white balance would be advantageos -- rather than changing for all diferent lighting conditions !

wasper

thebaz wrote:

I've been using my camera in non auto mode , recently , mainly using A setting , but sometimes at S . Can anyone tell me when White balance should be set , i have it set at auto , but are there any conditions when it is really benificial to set , as there seams to be settings for all conditions - cloud, flash , shade flourescent etc .
Cheers.

I am using Nikon D70s, I use WB Auto settings & put it to -2.
You will always need to tweak it in Software.

B0rG

Shoot in raw, then set the white balance in the convertor to your liking. Basically you increase the dynamic range of you photograph, plus you get the ability of easily adjusting tone of the photograph.

I found that some pictures can benefit with little warm appearing in low light underexposed photos.

thebaz

B0rG wrote:

Shoot in raw, then set the white balance in the convertor to your liking. Basically you increase the dynamic range of you photograph, plus you get the ability of easily adjusting tone of the photograph.

I found that some pictures can benefit with little warm appearing in low light underexposed photos.

Thanks Borg , never have shot in RAW -- apart from being able to set WB afterwards, any other advantages to shooting RAW , i usually just use Normal , so will it reduce my memory capacity by 50% using raw ?
Will the likes of Picasa read RAW , or are you tied to Photoshop when you need to re-convert them to jpg ?

Thanks.

Fajitas!

Get Adobe Lightroom Beta. It's free, and a very nice program.

It'll also let you decide the sharpness, compression, tones...er...and plenty of other stuff... Google it!

B0rG

Not sure what's with your camera but for Canon following is true: raw is 12bit wide (can't remember is it 12 or 14 bit) and jpeg is 8 bit only. More bits equals more color range. You want it of course

There are raw converters available that can convert straight into jpeg, but most of them convert to tiff. 4GB cards are less than 100 yo-yo which is pretty much acceptable.

My personal favorite is Capture One and then photoshop.

5uspect

i've heard that about Nikon RAW files too (12 bit anyway).
I suppose the best thing is to experiment in RAW until you find the style you like then set the white balance when shooting in JPEG mode to your preference then. There's no quick solution really I guess.