Another white balance.. but what would you do

Ok so I got into photography to take pics of my kids in night hockey last August...
I have been learning my camera for the most part...

so I will take pics and my family/friends like them....

now when I post pics here im told my WB is off.. and I appreciate the CC... so here is what I need help with.. I can do custom WB.. but... what do I WB off of?

example..
i setup my camera (t2i) with my 85mm f/1.8 as follows:
Shutter: 1/400+ (go up some if during day)
Aperature: f/1.8 - typically due to low light
ISO: 400/800/1600 - if sun is going down i can get away with 400 and move up as needed
WB: Auto - this is what im trying to get going
Metering: Spot - I just switched over to this so my pic exif may not show that...


so I will show a pic.. I believe the boards in the rink are NOT white.. more of an eggshell color.... sooooo the kids shirts are white...

now can I WB off of a kids shirt?

now to fully understand if the answer is yes...

so I setup my camera as what i said above..except for WB I will...
Take picture of kids shirt (whichever team has the more white)
Go into menu, Custom WB and choose that pic...

do I need to make sure to meter to 0 before taking that pic? do I need to make sure the shirt FILLS the pic or just the center where spot will spot off of?

so once all that is answered then i will know how to properly set a custom WB on my camera and how to use it...


then is processing.. which is another set... when I go into LR or PSE.. I use the eye dropper to set the custom WB by then selecting the kids shirt? or by setting the picture as my custom WB I shouldnt need to do that?

I really appreciate all of your replies.. I really do...

and sure CC away on what else I could improve on in the next pics...

1. sun going down so iso 400

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/56197228@N05/6​528206957/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/56197228@N05/6​508402433/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/56197228@N05/6​450124799/

In a perfect world you would shoot at a gray card target so you have a color neutral target to base your balance off of. Failing that, you just work with what you have. White is probably best, but as you have found all whites are not necessarily white. As for the night shots, one contributing factor is that the sodium vapor lights for a lot of arenas are not full spectrum lights. A rough explanation is that all colors are not rendered equally under these lights meaning your WB will appear off even when its somewhat accurate using even a custom WB.

There are many ways to WB. Use a grey card, purchase a WhiBal, Expodisk. During PP I usually click on something white. Mid grey works as well. At times I don't like the results so I select colour temp, move the slider so it is close to what the eyedropper selected and fine tune from there. Once you are happy you can add that formula to all your images.

You want to know the least expensive way to set up the WB. Next time you make coffee sneak one of the filters into your camera bag and use to set up your WB at the game.

thanks u 2... so one says grey card the other uses white coffee filter.. lol...

i gotcha's though...

do my pics look far off? i didnt look to see if they were raw edits or jpg... i just started shooting raw (actually have been but deleting them)... and processing the raw files...

No they are pretty close. If anything they are a tad underexposed.

digital paradise wrote in post #13620351
No they are pretty close. If anything they are a tad underexposed.

I think thats my feeling as well on the two daylight shots. The night shot is sort of what you expect from that sort of light.

digital paradise wrote in post #13620351
No they are pretty close. If anything they are a tad underexposed.

gonzogolf wrote in post #13620360
I think thats my feeling as well on the two daylight shots. The night shot is sort of what you expect from that sort of light.

i agree with both of you.. i just finished a photography class and learned a lot since these shots.. so hoping to do better..


so you guys are all saying that i dont really need to do a white balance or grey card at the rink.... but simply in LR if i know of the white.. i can just do it there?

or should i still do it in both?

TeleFragger wrote in post #13620380
i agree with both of you.. i just finished a photography class and learned a lot since these shots.. so hoping to do better..


so you guys are all saying that i dont really need to do a white balance or grey card at the rink.... but simply in LR if i know of the white.. i can just do it there?

or should i still do it in both?

If you are shooting raw the only reason to do a custom WB at the rink is to have a baseline "somewhat accurate" starting point for adjusting in post. It certainly makes things easier if you are doing batch processing to have a common starting point for all the shots (although any of the presets would do the same).

That is personal preference. I often wind up doing it later but sometimes will do it ahead of time. All depends on my mood. Sometimes it is interesting to see what my $2000 computer thinks when I use AWB. That is the great thing about RAW. Hard to mess anything up.

Technically I think it is more sound to do it ahead of time. If I were a pro processing a mass amount of images every week I would choose the method that made less work for me while PP.

thanks guys.. you guys are just reinforcing what i need to do ... i kinda figured that... last one for ya as it still falls in line..

so in class we learned about the histogram.. far left = underexposed, far right = over exposed and in the middle is pretty much 18% grey (i know 1/2 black and 1/2 white is 50% grey..so not sure why they say 18%...)... anyway..

what the instructor told us to do (this was in the landscape portion of the class) was to look for the bright spot, dark spot and neutral spot.. meter off of the neutral spot and move around and make sure you are not more than 2 stops towards over exposed as you will loose quality.. you can go more than 2 stops in underexposed and get it back....

now he said take the pic and make sure the histogram shows up the middle.. so instead of me using the white shirts couldnt i use the ground? you see the asphalt looks to be a mid tone? or am i looking at that wrong? i think out of the class the white balance (not gone over in detail) is where im struggling..

appreciate it...

here is another auto wb @ iso 1600... i think the white is too bright.. plus i think this was not a raw...

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/56197228@N05/6​348541169/

What I do at indoor basketball games is walk on the court before the game starts and shoot a photo of a white card (nothing special, just a white cardboard) in the light the game will be played in. You need to fill a bunch of the frame with the white card. Your camera manual will tell you how much. Then use that image to set a custom white balance. Works great for me.

The trouble I have is when the light changes during the game. Like when it starts with daylight coming in through the windows then the daylight goes away and all I'm left with is the crappy gym lights. When I face that I take another shot of the card at halftime.

For me this procedure has improved my photos from when I didn't worry about WB while shooting and fixed it in post.

bpalermini wrote in post #13620435
What I do at indoor basketball games is walk on the court before the game starts and shoot a photo of a white card (nothing special, just a white cardboard) in the light the game will be played in. You need to fill a bunch of the frame with the white card. Your camera manual will tell you how much. Then use that image to set a custom white balance. Works great for me.

The trouble I have is when the light changes during the game. Like when it starts with daylight coming in through the windows then the daylight goes away and all I'm left with is the crappy gym lights. When I face that I take another shot of the card at halftime.

For me this procedure has improved my photos from when I didn't worry about WB while shooting and fixed it in post.

good idea... so now what if you took that opportunity to look around for something that matches that card's color... then you only have to walk out there once.. and can change wb anytime? i think ill do this.. i will walk out there and match up white for white.. then know that is my reference point at all times... !!!! SWEET!!!!

Okay a few things bother me about your recounting of his method. The first is your understanding of 18% gray. The 18% (and some say its more like 12% for modern digitals) is the rate at which light is reflected off of subjects in average. White is more, black is less. The meters measure reflected light, so it has to assume something in this case an 18% average. Your meter doesnt know what its pointed at. If you were metering off an 12% gray card you would be getting an accurate exposure. But since we rarely have anything in the scene that gives us that we have to use a proxy. so pick something close to middle tones and start from there.

The histogram is showing something else, its showing the distribution of brightness in the scene. A lot of photographers use the ETTR method. which means Expose To The Right. This means take your highlights to the right edge of the histogram without going off the edge. This allows you to retain highlights, with no blown areas where you lose detail, and its easier to bring middle and shadow areas back into range in post. By trying to keep the histogram dead in the middle you are easily fooled by scenes that have an overabundance of light tones, like the rink shot with white walls or white jerseys, or mostly dark scenes with one bright subject.

Unless a scene is backlit I find evaluative metering mode does a pretty darned good job. I will take advantage of whites especially during wedding. That is crucial to me. I will also take advantage of whites if available at other events but you need to be careful of brighter things like floodlights, etc. If no whites are available and it is durning the day and outside I'll meter off grass or sky. Otherwise I just try to balance the histogram as best as I can - ETTR. I trust my cameras metering system as it rarely lets me down in a well balanced scene. Of course if 90% of the image is is snow or charcoal then I adjust accordingly.

In this last image you have a pretty good balance of white and black so I would suspect the camera would do a decent job.

TeleFragger wrote in post #13620431
so in class we learned about the histogram.. far left = underexposed, far right = over exposed and in the middle is pretty much 18% grey (i know 1/2 black and 1/2 white is 50% grey..so not sure why they say 18%...)... anyway..

what the instructor told us to do (this was in the landscape portion of the class) was to look for the bright spot, dark spot and neutral spot.. meter off of the neutral spot and move around and make sure you are not more than 2 stops towards over exposed as you will loose quality.. you can go more than 2 stops in underexposed and get it back....

now he said take the pic and make sure the histogram shows up the middle.. so instead of me using the white shirts couldnt i use the ground? you see the asphalt looks to be a mid tone? or am i looking at that wrong? i think out of the class the white balance (not gone over in detail) is where im struggling..

I can't see your photos at work, but I don't really think the above is a good explanation of the histogram.

Don't think of the histogram as showing you whether the photo is overexposed or underexposed. Instead think like this: the histogram shows you how much bright stuff is in the photo, how much dark stuff is in the photo, and how much medium-toned stuff is in the photo.

A handful of examples:
If you take a picture of a polar bear in the snow, the histogram should be a huge hill on the right. That's not overexposed - it's correctly exposed, because you're taking a picture of a bunch of white stuff. If you were to take a photo that put the "hill" right smack in the middle of the histogram, it would be underexposed - the snow would look dirty and grey, and details in the shadows (bear's nose and eyes) would be completely lost. But the camera thinks it's right, because the camera doesn't know any better, and just tries to make everything "average" with the hill in the middle.

If you take a picture of a bride in a big white dress, standing in front of a black wall, you're going to have a big spike near the right edge of the histogram (the white dress), and a big spike near the left edge (the black wall), and a very pronounced valley in the middle. The middle won't be completely flat, because you've got other mid-tone elements such as the bride's skin and hair, and shadowed areas of the dress. Correctly exposed, and no hill in the middle. If your spikes are running up against the edges of the histogram, you're either underexposed (left spike falling off the edge, you're losing detail in the black wall) or overexposed (right spike falling off the edge, you're losing detail in the white dress). HOWEVER! sometimes the camera just can't get the detail in the shadows AND the highlights, and you have to make that choice - do I lose detail in the dress, or the wall? I would usually choose to lose detail in the wall, and retain all the detail in the dress.

At a hockey game, the ice in the rink is mostly white. The hill should fall closer to the right than the middle. You'll have some elements in the middle and low end of the histogram: the markings on the ice, the players' uniforms, etc. But if you're shooting from above and most of your shot is the ice in the rink, you're going to need a little more exposure than simply putting the histogram and the meter needle in the middle. If you're shooting from ice-level, you'll probably have about half a frame of ice and half a frame of bleachers/spectators/o​ther - so your histogram will probably have a spike near the right (the ice), then probably taper off toward the left.

It's up to you, the smart photographer, to look at the subject matter, and look at the histogram, and determine whether you're getting the right exposure. You can't just try to aim for the middle all the time, or your results will never be any better than the "average" that the camera wants to make. The camera isn't smart, it doesn't know what you're taking a picture of, it just wants to put everything nice and safe and in the middle, and it doesn't know if that's the right thing to do or not.


Also, note that you use the histogram primarily for exposure, not necessarily for white balance.