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White balanceM. S. of upstate New York asked, ‘Which white balance settings should I use?’ Let’s start by looking at why white balance is used.The Purpose of White BalancePictures taken under an artificial light will have a color cast, e.g. an incandescent light globe will give images a yellowish tint so that areas of the image that should look white will appear pale yellow.White balance is used to create an image with a neutral color cast, i.e. to make it look as if it was taken under a neutral white light. So if you were trying to take a professional quality image of a work of art and the available lighting was not suitably neutral then you would adjust the white balance to suit the color cast. RAW versus white balanceIf a professional photographer was asked about white balance, chances are she/he would tell you to use the RAW image quality setting and (assuming that white balance has not been disabled under the RAW setting) switch it off or keep white balance to as neutral as possible and do your white balance adjustments on your computer. When using the RAW setting the white balance can be adjusted on your computer using the custom software that came with your camera or an application such as Photoshop or The GIMP. Note: you may have to export you image to JPEG or TIFF file format to edit it with third party software. When an image is stored in RAW format it effectively has a one to one relationship to the pixels in your camera’s sensor. The idea is that what your sensor ‘saw’ is what is stored in the file. When an image is stored as a JPEG it is compressed so some of the information is lost. RAW format allows the flexibility to modify the image in various ways without losing the original information so long as you have a copy of the original RAW format file.Art Vs ScienceAll that is fine if all you want to do is capture an accurate record of your subject but an accurate image is not necessarily the most artistic or appealing. I do not usually shoot in RAW format myself since it takes a lot longer to process all the images on my old computer and since it is overkill for my target media (i.e. a pc screen). I select the highest quality JPEG setting and I set my white balance to auto and leave it like that unless I can see a huge difference between the colors on the LCD screen and the colors that I am trying to capture (which may be more exaggerated than the actual colors of the scene). Also after I have uploaded the image to my computer I will often use an image editing program to increase the contrast, brightness and color saturation. After that I will often add a deliberate color cast to emphasize the natural colors. If a color cast is not suitable for the entire image (e.g. a magenta cast might work for the sky but not grass) then I will apply a color cast selectively using the lasso tool (the lasso tool may require a suitable level of feathering).White Balance, PC Screens and PrintingThat’s not to say I would never use RAW. If I was trying to capture an image that I intended use for a high quality print then RAW would be preferable. Printing an image can reveal flaws that are not visible on a computer screen since a print can have a wider range of colors than can be shown on a computer. It also pays to make sure that your monitor (and the room that your monitor is in) is as neutral as possible since if your monitor is not set to the right brightness or has a color cast of its own, it will effect the way that you enhance your own images, so that in turn will affect the way that your images appear on other computers and the quality of your prints. Your monitor will usually have menu buttons on it that will allow you to adjust brightness, contrast and color temperature. Unfortunately there is such a large range in the quality of computer screens that it is not possible to enhance your image in a way that suits all of them.Experiment and Check Your ResultsIf you prefer to set white balance while you are on location then here is what I would suggest. Before you take the images that you are trying to capture, take a few test shots and use the settings that obtain the most appealing result. If you have access to a laptop with a good quality screen and an SD card reader then you might like to take that with you and upload your images as soon as you have taken them to see your results immediately. Note that if you are taking the photos during the day then you might need to find a nice shady spot to see the screen properly.Don’t be afraid to experiment, explore the various setting on your camera but in the end I think you will find that using image editing software on your computer will give you greater flexibility and at least at the present time, greater quality. |
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