Shane Smith
14th of May 2003 (Wed), 11:10
Hi, new to the forum here...
I recently bought my 10D and this is my first experience playing with digital imaging.
I have been obsessing on white balance, and reading numerous WB posts via my searches here. I have recently had a sort of epiphany: in camera WB setting doesn't really matter. Am I right?
I've been setting custom WB off of an 18% gray card, expodisc, and off gray card over exposed by a half stop (based on info from another post on here). I've also been using AWB. For each of these settings I then went and shot the same subject (green shrub with brown mulch and sand colored wall background under overcast sky), in raw mode, over and over. The expodisc resulted in a color temp of 5600, the two gray card images came in at 6000 and 6200 and the AWB was at 4600. The AWB looked closest to reality even though C1 wanted all the images to be at 5650. Once I had my images in C1, though, I was able to make them all look the same by just changing the temp to match across images.
For some reason I was obsessing b/c I thought the custom WB setting might affect subsequent exposure results. That doesn't seem to be the case. The WB setting from the camera can just be thought of as a "best guess jumping off point" with bad guesses being easily corrected for later. A bad WB setting doesn’t seem to result in a loss of some color like a bad exposure would have resulted in loss of detail. Have I made the correct conclusion?
Thanks for reading such a long first post....
I recently bought my 10D and this is my first experience playing with digital imaging.
I have been obsessing on white balance, and reading numerous WB posts via my searches here. I have recently had a sort of epiphany: in camera WB setting doesn't really matter. Am I right?
I've been setting custom WB off of an 18% gray card, expodisc, and off gray card over exposed by a half stop (based on info from another post on here). I've also been using AWB. For each of these settings I then went and shot the same subject (green shrub with brown mulch and sand colored wall background under overcast sky), in raw mode, over and over. The expodisc resulted in a color temp of 5600, the two gray card images came in at 6000 and 6200 and the AWB was at 4600. The AWB looked closest to reality even though C1 wanted all the images to be at 5650. Once I had my images in C1, though, I was able to make them all look the same by just changing the temp to match across images.
For some reason I was obsessing b/c I thought the custom WB setting might affect subsequent exposure results. That doesn't seem to be the case. The WB setting from the camera can just be thought of as a "best guess jumping off point" with bad guesses being easily corrected for later. A bad WB setting doesn’t seem to result in a loss of some color like a bad exposure would have resulted in loss of detail. Have I made the correct conclusion?
Thanks for reading such a long first post....