Custom white balance questions

[sugar_babygirli]

Well, I'm bored currently and was thinking of some questions I'd wondered for awhile, but haven't asked yet.

If I want to shoot photos of people in a room that has all different kinds of lighting (such as flourescent, tungsten, and daylight all in the same room), how do I customize white balance? Would it be safest to just leave it on Auto WB? (mostly all my photos have had decent results on this)

Also, if I'd be shooting dancers on stage with all different colored lights flashing at different times, it's not like I could run up there with a gray card, get the reading, and they customize from there. :lol: Auto WB again?

haha thanks! I can't wait till tomorrow my 85mm 1.8 lense comes in! :)

[Chazs]

I've done a few shots with flashing stage lighting or mixed lighting. AWB will work, but I prefer to shoot RAW and play with the colors later.

[robertwgross]

If you have constantly-changing stage lighting, then you probably do not want any kind of Auto white balancing, and you probably do not want any kind of (single) custom white balancing. You probably want to set the white balance to one fixed position, e.g. tungsten, or whatever the predominant light source is, and then leave it there. As the stage lighting continues to change, the effect in your shots will change.

I'm guessing that you do not want to try to cancel out all of that change and make them all appear the same (because that is counter to what the lighting designer is trying to do).

---Bob Gross---

[sugar_babygirli]

Thank you for your suggestions! I will experiment with both AWB, and also the predominant light source to get different effects! That is a cool idea Bob.

[Jon]

For stage lighting, it's probably 3200K or 3400K, or use Tungsten, not AWB. That'll let the gelling go through. If it's mixed domestic lighting (fluorescent, tungsten, daylight), doing a CWB will let you zero out for one, maybe two of them, but the shadow areas are always going to be off since they're going to be getting lit by some, not all, of the possible light types. AWB won't be any worse than any other option there, I think.