Color washing, how to compensate

I was at the historic races at Laguna, form time to time, I noticed photos washing. Meaning is the Color is not as it should be. I understand shooting High gloss polished cars can be a bit of a trick. So I took a few test shots

the first is original color looks good, the second you can see the difference in color. The third was a test with AWB color temp set at 3700 or somethign like that.

How do you compensate

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This was goofing with color temp at 3700

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Did you shoot RAW? If so set the color temp to 5500K (which is flash and sunlight) and see how things look.

If the camera is in auto WB then things can change without reason at times. The second is over exposed a little too, so that will change the colors a bit.

Control WB with a deliberate setting for Jpeg, or shoot RAW as has been suggested and set the WB later to whatever you want.

EXPOSURE!

As you overexpose, you decrease the saturation of the color with too much light. And as you underexpose, you increase the saturation of the color. Here is a series where the exposure differences are obvious due to the face, but if you merely look at the color of the car you will see the saturation difference...and this is merely due to altering the exposure in the RAW file (0EV, +1EV, -1EV) and outputting three different JPEGs.

I always shoot in RAW just in case. AWB is frustrating as it tends to get thrown off when the whole image is of one color, in your case blue.

Even if you shoot one photo set to a hard white balance, the next one will look wrong. I have found the AWB works most of the time. However, there will be that one time when you least expect it most.

I agree the exposure did vary from shot to shot.

Cool car.

wabernat wrote in post #6126982
I always shoot in RAW just in case. AWB is frustrating as it tends to get thrown off when the whole image is of one color, in your case blue.

Even if you shoot one photo set to a hard white balance, the next one will look wrong. I have found the AWB works most of the time. However, there will be that one time when you least expect it most.

I agree the exposure did vary from shot to shot.

Cool car.

A ton of cool cars, I was at a friends racing rig (Tiger Racing) who has Bugatti and Alpha Romeo

Along comes Jay Leno and says now this is a cool car
Leno and me

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PhotoSportsOnline wrote in post #6127224
I set the AWB to be 3700 in that last pick just to see what would happen. Hence the post now, I think I was on the correct thought path as noted regarding exposure. Your comments on AWB would explain why I can shoot three consecutive shots at the same subject and get three differing exposures Something that baffles me

Thanks for the info

Consider this...WB in clear sunlight has one value, WB under the canopy can have a very different value due to affects of the canopy material. If you shoot a scene which is partially under the canopy but has background scene content in the sunlight, you not have a mixed WB scene. So unless your camera is rigidly on a tripod and does not move, any scene shift can have notable differences on AWB because each one has a different mix of under-canopy vs. under-sun proportions