White balance not ...balanced? What am I doing wrong?

The few times that I shoot with a white balance card on location I've used a thin grey cardboard card that I got with a photo magazine a long time ago. It has worked well enough for my needs (obviosly not color critical enough that I cannot eye-ball it myself). Recently a friend bought a small WhiBal and I thought I'd borrow it for some test shots at home to see how it compared to the piece of cardboard that I have, especially after looking through all those impressive videos on their site.

I shoot raw and use my card at the subject where whatever I light I use falls upon. Here's my question; the way to determine a white balance card in real life is to see how balanced or neutral the color channels are in post processing, right?

In Lightroom I use the color picker and when I hover over the WhiBal the channels are way off, like the (low light) image I'm looking at now is 40.0 red, 34.5 green and 29.8 blue, the t-shirt behind it being much more balanced, so is my cheap paper. Is this right/normal? Although the card is very small (with only half of it actually being grey (the other part being the sticker)) I get variations up to several hundred degrees Kelvin depending on where I click on it.

Things get considerably better when I'm using strobes, but so does the white t-shirt or the cheap-o piece of grey cardboard (not to mention the color temperature being right straight out of the camera to begin with).

Am I missing something here?

The WhiBal reading will not be correct until you click on it with the White Balance tool; simply hovering over it is not enough.

Yeah, right, of course. But I'm not talking about the white balance in the image in itself but rather the neutrality of the WhiBal color. Hovering or clicking on it doesn't change the value of the channels (*edit* of course it does, I didn't type that, an evil gnome is playing tricks on me */edit*).

I suspect this has to do with mixed lightning (although I actually only had two spotlights of the same make and age but I know they can vary quite a bit despite of this). I will continue to do some tests tomorrow. It's just I thought a "professional" white balance card would do better in this particular instance, I mean if all I use is strobes the temperature is going to be around 5500K anyways?

Ah, wait a minute, I think I get what you're saying now.... It's after I click/adjust the color temperate (with the whibal) that the colors are supposed to be even?

I just had a Lightrules moment, please carry on, nothing to see here! =)

*thread locked*

LOL...yes, you got it. Hovering only shows you the distribution of color in the light hitting the WhiBal. Clicking the tool on the card will neutralize the image.

Oh...and another thought.

I don't know what size WhiBal you're using but fortunately Canon cameras only need you to fill the center circle of the frame with a grey card then you can use that shot to set a Custom White Balance in the camera.

That will remove one step from your post processing as your WB will be correct straight out of the camera. Plus, you wouldn't have to ask a question like this one

so why couldn't i just shoot a piece of non- glossy white plexiglass?

brantfordbandit wrote in post #6688632
so why couldn't i just shoot a piece of non- glossy white plexiglass?

When you use Whibal to set WB for raw files, you use the gray part of the Whibal card, not the white part. It's a neutral gray; that's what makes the ACR white balance tool work.

my Canon manual says u can just shoot a piece of white paper, so the non glare white plexiglass should work.

brantfordbandit wrote in post #6688780
my Canon manual says u can just shoot a piece of white paper, so the non glare white plexiglass should work.

Those are instructions for setting custom white balance in the camera when shooting jpeg. The original question was about setting white balance when post-processing raw files. When using a Whibal card for that purpose, you use ACR's white balance tool on the gray part of the card.

brantfordbandit wrote in post #6688632
so why couldn't i just shoot a piece of non- glossy white plexiglass?

brantfordbandit wrote in post #6688780
my Canon manual says u can just shoot a piece of white paper, so the non glare white plexiglass should work.

So who are you going to believe?

I shoot a grey white balance target and set my custom WB in camera. I also use the same WB target for post processing if I don't get a custom WB set in the camera.

The issue with white is that white is not neutral. Truth is white comes in many colors. And since the manual says PAPER you're already going off track using Plexiglas. I'll bet white plexi comes in many colors too.

If you shoot white paper ON THE METER READING, it will photograph gray, just what the cam needs for Custom WB. Use that exposure for the WB set-up.
It's pretty good for adjusting exposure too, when there are bright highlights that aren't important in the frame.
Need an exposure crutch?

Gray Card…White Paper. What’s best?

And just to muddy the waters a bit, remember that the "correct" WB isn't necessarily the "right" WB for a particular image? Would you want to neutralize the nice colors in a sunset?
While I always start out with a WB, I sometimes warm up or cool down a shot, depending on what I think looks good. Sometimes, I only will do that to part of an image. In this one, I replaced the sky & then decided the Mustang needed some reflections from the sky:
Mustang & B-17 + PS

Would the last shot here, '40 Fords - Three of 'em! look better if I'd used the right WB?

How about these? A post WB off her teeth gives a totally different & uninteresting image:
Barbara Payton at the Carrick House Concert 11/23/08