Custom White Balance

[Laurab]

I have a 20D and am trying to understand the custom white balance process. I am using the manual and confused that it tells you to change the white balance setting from custom when you shoot the white object. Anyone understand why we do that?:rolleyes:

[Vega$50]

From what I understand....in a given situation...say you are shooting kids at the dinner table, and you want the true white balance for that situation. You would take a white or grey card, such as an Expodisc, shoot that, and in your settings use it as your custom white balance for that situation. If you have a new scenario, like flowers outside, you would do the whole process again.

To set the shot of the white card as your custom white balance, you would bring up the shot in your LCD and go to the menu and in your custom white balance setting, use that photo as the custom setting....I hope this makes sense...

[ron chappel]

You can shoot a white,grey or black card ,it doesn't matter as long as it has no colour at all

I experimented with several white objects at home and found a white fly spray can cap and a white detergent container that both gave excellent results compared to the preset tungsten or flouro settings
Just turn off the AF on the lens so it doesn't bug you,get in real close and take a pic of the white/grey item so that the light scource is falling on it.
It doesn't matter in the slightest that you now have a blury grey picture instead of a sharp white image .The camera now has all it needs to do the job
Now you need to tell the camera to choose that picture to measure against for it's CWB .
How to set CWB is a slightly tricky 3 stage proccess on the 300D so i'm guessing it may be on the 20D too..?
First stage is to take the 'greycard' pic as outlined above

Next turn on the main menu and choose custom WB .
Press set .
dial in the photo you want (if it's the one you just tokk it will come up first anyway)
Press set .
turn the menu off .

Ok-all you have to do now is turn the white ballance to the 'custom' symbol

Job done :)


"If you have a new scenario, like flowers outside, you would do the whole process again"

Yes,you have to take a fresh shot every time you change light situations.You can of course keep those shots on the card to use again later which is handy .All it takes then is several button pushes to reset the custom white ballance to the pic you want

[dhbailey]

Ron's method is the same with the 20D.

Interesting results can happen if you take a picture of a COLORED object, and then select that for customWB. I was at my mother-in-law's house over Christmas and her dining room is VERY red. So I shot a section of her red wall, set CustomWB using that as the guide, and then took a picture of the room -- it came out with very blue highlights!

One important thing to remember concerning CustomWB -- you need to set it for each situation you are in. Don't set it once and then select it over and over again in different situations. You can print off a gray card yourself in your word processor (at least I did, using WordPerfect) so I have one in my camera bag and can very easily replace it when it gets ragged.

[Jim_T]

I really don't like the custom white balance system the EOS cameras use... As a matter of fact, I hate it :)

If you aren't bang on, it shows.. I've tried endlessly to shoot city scenes under sodium vapor lamps and almost always have a green cast in the images. And.. As mentioned, you have to create a new reference shot for every situation. This function seems only good for studio situations where you have fixed lights of a certain color temperature.

When white balance in the wild is a concern for me, I usually shoot RAW and then select a white point with the 'eyedropper' function most RAW converters have..

I recently took some shots in a gymnasium that had odd colored flourescent lights. Not only that, but the lighting color varied in the gym.. There were windows near the cieling on one of the walls that let in daylight that mixed on the opposite wall with the artificial light..

None of the 'canned' white balance selections gave good results.. But.. The white on the participants uniforms made a perfect selection point for the eyedropper..

[merrrrjig]

The auto WB and presets have been working fine for me, but I think I might try out the custom whit balance stuff

[Adam Hicks]

I took some family photos in a room with incandescent lighting AND yellow walls, and even the AWB couldn't handle it. Metered it with my 18% grey card and all of the colors looked more natural and MUCH, MUCH better than the camera can do. These particular images were almost unusable without custom white balance. I will say though, that 95% of the time I shoot with the AWB and it does well.

Adam

[Jesper]

I really don't like the custom white balance system the EOS cameras use... As a matter of fact, I hate it :)

If you aren't bang on, it shows.. I've tried endlessly to shoot city scenes under sodium vapor lamps and almost always have a green cast in the images.
Sodium vapor lamps are the worst kind of light to try and make a photo with. The light of a sodium vapor lamp is very far from white light, the frequency spectrum is limited to a very narrow band of yellow light, so it's almost impossible to see colours with this light. I'm not surprised you couldn't make good photos in that light. No camera will be able to capture colours well under that light.

For custom white balance, instead of shooting a grey card, you can also put a white coffee filter in front of your lens and make a photo towards the main light source (put lens on MF first), and use that to set the custom white balance. You can also buy an ExpoDisc (http://www.expodisc.com/), but it's expensive and a coffee filter works just as well.

[Laurab]

Thanks to everyone for help with WB. This forum is cool.