screwed whitebalance? Help me out please!

What do you think about these shots I'm about to show of some swans I took the other day. I know the 10D is supposed to give a very "natural" look in the default-settings (it is, sharpness, saturation, contrast all left a default values of "0"). Although I don't find this "normal", I find it very grayish

This is how the picture looks out of the camera. Only modifications are that some small parts around the image is cropped out, and it's been rescaled down to a size this forum hopefully accepts:

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

The histogram of the original image is fairly narrow, which explains the gray look. The auto-levels is simply stretching the dynamic range of the image by adjusting the black and white points. Personally, I'd rather not do auto-anything, but make adjustments manually to better assess the impact of any changes.

The second image is clearly an improvement, but there's still seems to be a muddy yellow cast to the picture.

The scene is tricky for AWB, it is a long way from being "typical" - big dark area of water and a great blob of mainly white. The water has been "assumed" to be almost neutral judging by the RGB values.

CWB is obviously the most accurate method, but I'm finding that setting a fixed WB - I normally choose 5200K for daylight work - works well.

You don't use K settings for CWB, but "Custom WB" from the menu and dial the CWB symbol on the WB scale, which is just above K -= see p51 in the manual.

Regards,

Ok, thanks. For the "auto-things" I usually use auto-levels when I have a lot of shots. It usually matches very good, but sometimes it's totally off. Find it much easier for me to just try it on every picture, as it's very good compared to what I set if I do it manual for 90+ of my shots. Then I rather correct those it miss.

I also use Gimp's Color-enhance the same way, but setting manual contrast/color for those where it miss. This workflow is fast for me, cause I usually shoot several hundred pictures when at an event, and I don't find I have the patience to manually correct each one, when autolevels use to work as good as it does.

But I'm interested in the manual WB. How "sensitive" is this stuff? I mean. If I shoot a white object, during bright sunshine, and the sun suddenly gets covered by a sky for some minutes, mustn't it then be reset for the new lightning? And then again when the sun is no longer covered by a sky? And if I suddenly see something interesting in a shadow from a building, then I'll have to calibrate once more, and then back again when I've taken the shot? How do you guys (who doesn't shoot raw all the time (if there's any of you)) cope with all this?

On closer inspection it appears that your swan image is underexposed (the muddy look, grey whites). Simply boosting the contrast seems to really bring this image up while not affecting the toneality of the image as much as Auto color/levels, as evidenced by the histogram.
WB or color temp issues on the other hand would give you definite color shifts. Your whites are still white so there is no color shift, hence WB/color temp is OK.....

First of all, let's not lump all of the problems together. White Balance is a completely different subject from exposure. If a normally white object shows up in the image as gray, then that is not a white balance problem. That is exposure, and it is often best dealt with by exposure compensation, not white balance. What was the exposure compensation set for, considering the subject?

Auto White Balance can give you good or bad results. It is generally good if there is only a single source of light, like daylight. If you have multiple sources of light, like daylight plus tungsten, you can get weird color shifts.

Custom White Balance works pretty good, assuming that you start with a good target card. In fact, if you think about it, you can get some interesting and positive effects by setting a custom white balance that is to something other than pure white. Try shooting a pink card, then setting custom white balance on it, then shoot a normal subject, like a face. See the effect? Now try the whole thing in reverse by setting up custom on a pale blue card. See the effect?

"These shots are taken in AWB (I think)." That will give you the worst result... not knowing for sure where your white balance is set.

---Bob Gross---

If it's an exposure-problem, then I really do a lot of exposure-errors Thank God for digital =D I'll try to keep a close eye on this problem, and do my best to exposure "to-the-right" and see if I can eliminate this "problem" by removing the.. err.. human error Thanks for the help

Vvizard - That swan shot looks to me like it was taken on a gray, cloudy day. Water reflects the sky color, and there is virtually no color in the shot. The exposure (centered in the histogram) and WB look OK to me. There just isn't any dynamic range, which is why it improves with levels adjustment. You're in Norway, right - land of midnight sun. What happens during the day?

Actually you might be right. It wasn't clear sky that day :/ So it could be the problem. But I've had this on _many_ other shots too, where there's no "heaven-reflecting-items" involved. That's why I was worried

Where I live (south in Norway) we don't have midnight-sun. Or.. During summer, we got light until 11pm or so, and a brief amount of total darkness from then until 02-03am or so. I guess that's quite long compared to people living further south in the world. Went to Malta once, and then it snapped from daylight to complete darkness in about 30minutes or so (was drunk all the time, so can't remember exactly ).. But if you move north in this country, you will have midnight-sun, which basically mean not only "midnight-sun", but that the sun never goes below horizon for a couple of weeks. Never been up there to experience it, but probably will, since I'm likely to spend two years of military service up there starting this summer. Then will also be a great time to test how cold temperatures the 10D can survive. Not unusual with -40C up there in the winter. On the other hand, North-Norway got some of the prettiest landscapes in the world if one is to believe photographers, so it can't be all bad

What metering did you use? Maybe it was fooled by the white colour...

I want to travel to Norway, maybe next year. It should be a beautiful place. I read some beautiful places, like Bergen, canals, and fjords. I don't know much about North Norway but only the midnight sun. What places do you suggest? (And is it easy to access to?)

Norway is one crappy land to travel in, cause it's so looong, and got so many fjords and mountains that transportation is hard. (Read: takes a long time). You won't find any 8-lane speedways here, since so much have to be built in tunnels/bridges etc. So if you intend to be both south and north, either plan on beeing here for quite a while, while taking car/bus/boat from one place to another. That's probably the best, as you get the whole country, which changes A LOT (both scenery and cultural) along the way. Or you can of course fly from south to north in a short time..

I've never been more than halfway up this country, so I really can't recommend places I haven't been. But just around our Capital (Oslo) you will find _plenty_ of nice nature (mountains, forrests, fjords) within as little as 20-40 kilometres. Bergen is also a very nice city. The trip there from Oslo will force you through some killer nature too

Then it's a special boat-trip from Bergen up north. It's expensive, but it's said to be one of the most beautiful boat-rides ever. Takes a couple of days, and let's you see most of norway from the sea. Drives into narrow fjords etc.

But seriously I recommend asking someone else, as I've almost never been far away from Oslo, unfortunatly. I've almost promised myself to do some travelling in Norway, but still haven't gotten around doing so.. But I will... sometime

Oh, I might have used partial metering for the swans. That might of course have fooled the exposure, but I'm not sure.. The exif says "Metering mode: pattern"

If you shoot a white color subject, and it turns out gray, then that is an exposure problem. If you shoot a white color subject, and it turns out pink or blue, then that is a color balance problem.

The difficulty, of course, is when you have a fleeting moment to try to capture a moving subject. You have to have virtually everything set up in advance, and for those settings to be virtually foolproof, and then you snap...

---Bob Gross---

I'm new to the forum, but have been using the 10D for a while. The AWB only seems to work in outdoor sunshining days, but be careful in morning or evening because it can go yellow. Partial cloudy days with the sun going in and out are also best with AWB for those quick shots when you don't have time to readjust. However CWB is best for everything. A little trick I've learned after many goofs is to balance on a white textured surface ie. a baby blanket, jacket, sheepskin. Grays also works. But a white card can cause false readings at times. Gray cards are much better. But textured white has always worked in a pinch. CWB would have helped the photo a bit, but I agree that it was the exposure that was the true culprit. I'm not sure that your second image would have turned out as white as it did if it was an AWB problem.