white balance

This is another "can't I just do that in Photoshop" question.
How important is setting a specific camera white balance vs. using the "auto" setting? A friend suggests using the "cloudy" setting for most outdoor shooting. Is it best to use a gray card or other device to get the most accurate setting?

Others can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that most everyone on this site doing wildlife photography uses the AUTO-WB feature (or a specific WB setting they choose, not a default like 'cloudy'). Today's DSLR's are very advanced, and the auto-wb is almost always spot-on (or very near) so only a minor adjustment is needed. While cloudy may be helpful in some situations, there will invariably be others when you forget to switch it (or don't have the time to switch it) and you'll end up with pictures you have to spend extra time correcting, so why not just shoot auto and not worry about it?

- Luke

At least 99% of the time I use auto WB, very rarely I do use the other presets unless there are specific weather conditions where I think a different WB may work better (fog for instance).

In RAW I can adjust those settings if I want very easily.

Speaking as a commercial shooter who also does nature and wildlife, I'm always suspicious of AWB in settings or framings with a dominant color, whether red sandstone, green vegetation or lots of blue sky or water. I work from the camera presets or do custom white balances any time I doubt the AWB.

I'm not a documentary, or commercial photographer anymore so I never use a grey card, and I use Auto WB 100% of the time. One of the beautiful advantages of shooting RAW, you can assign WB in your RAW converter. If you're during critical color work with a companies logo or something I can see where you would use a grey card or color swatch card.

I use AWB 100% of the time.
The only time it doesn't come close is when indoors under artificial light.
Doesn't much matter anyway when shooting RAW.

I guess I'm the contrarian. I usually use daylight WB. It's what I was used to when I was shooting film. Shooting in RAW, I can change it after the fact if I want to. Occasionally I do, but usually the daylight setting suits my taste.

Auto WB seems to work for many situations, as long as you understand and respect its limitations, ie, the relatively narrow range (on a D200 its really only accurate between 4500K and 6200K, making it useless in indoor lighting situations), difficulty with certain color casts along the green-magenta range, etc. White or Gray card WB is useful to remove color casts in the light source, but useless when the light source's color is part of the image (sunrises, sunsets, etc). While you can always adjust WB in post processing, its always best to nail it during the taking of the image. Anytime you make a post processing color or luminance adjustment, even on a raw file, you run the risk of diminishing dynamic range and clipping colors - and the same applies to WB adjustments.

While you can always adjust WB in post processing...

Roger - Something to remember is that if you're shooting RAW, the white balance isn't set until you process the RAW files. So that's where you see a variety of opinions above. If you're shooting JPGs, it's much harder to correct for a poorly set white balance. You can take out casts and make changes, but not nearly as nicely as with RAW.

For JPGs, I would say just selecting "cloudy" is a bad idea, as it can throw things way off if you don't know what you're doing. In fact, the "cloudy" setting on my camera looks decidedly off when shooting in normal sunlight. I'm not sure how much variation there is by camera there - probably not a whole lot.

Overall, why not just take a few shots outdoors at various white balance settings and take a look at the results?

Good point David.

Even in nature shooting, if you're including people in your shots like so many markets want, you really have to watch your WB due to skin tones. I've got to say that even post processing RAW files, skin tones are tricky. In jpeg, if skin tones are involved you really want to do custom white balances even outdoors.

David,

Setting the white balance correctly during image capture is always preferable to correcting it in post processing.There is a simple test that can easily illustrate this. Take a shot with the same exposure settings, using different white balance settings including a custom set white balance. Then in your raw converter use a set gray point or equivalent method of setting white balance. If it doesn't matter, as most people who talk about white balance adjustment in raw workflow as being without penalty, the histograms for all the images should be EXACTLY the same. This will not be the case - you will find subtle and sometimes not so subtle differences among the histograms - in many cases, the histogram will shift to the left, which will cause an increase in noise as you adjust the exposure, and there will be individual color differences. This last point is important when you shoot a scene with highly saturated colors - making a RAW white balance adjustment could result in colors being clipped that were right on the threshold of clipping, or colors already clipped will show up oddly in the image. So extending Hank's point a bit - regardless of shooting raw or jpg, if you can set a custom white balance, you will be better off.

Thanks for all the feedback. I think now know more about white balance than I anticipated. From now on, I'll go back to using auto WB. Most of my shooting is outdoors, but I did shot a martial arts competition a few weeks ago and forgot to change from my usual "cloudy" setting. Everything was green, but easily corrected in RAW.

I agree with Gene's post. If you just use AWB or even a preset and go into RAW and try to find a gray point, does the colors come out to be as an example, 233, 233, 233? If so, then you have a good gray point that will take out all of the color cast. If it comes up with 233,219, 245, then you will have a color cast and will not be able to correct it fully with out totally eliminating the color cast. This is where a properly positioned gray card will come into play. Even with it being properly positioned, I would highly recommend using a white balance preset based on your current condition, sunny outside, use sunny; if it is cloudy use cloudy preset. This can be easily tested and proven with about 30 min. worth of setup, shot and white balance processing with your favorite software. Also remember, an 18% gray card is used for exposure, a digital gray card is used to reflect equal amounts of Red, Green and Blue light. If you do not have equal amounts of Red, Green and Blue light, you have a color cast. Also, shoot in RAW format and not JPEG.

If it comes up with 233,219, 245, then you will have a color cast...

And I'd argue that, personally, that would be plenty accurate enough, and I may tweak it to taste anyway. I guess it depends on how truly accurate you want to be - which varies a lot from person to person. As with most things in photography, there is some personal preference involved with white balance.

Here is a good way to remove color cast in PS. Seems to work, but it does make some serious changes to the histogram. Open an image. Duplicate it. On the copy, apply a blur average. It will turn to a gray (more or less) fill. Make the source image the editing target. Create a levels adjustment layer. Now this is important, use the middle tone sampling eyedropper and sample the copy for gray. As soon as you click, the source image will lose its cast. Its a little trick that I have used time and time again to fix color casts, but its not perfect. By putting the adjustment on a separate layer, you can dial in the desired amount of cast removal.

Always AUTO for me. Then I do it in the best place there is, Adobe Camera Raw. Sometimes I will fine tune that in PS. I see absolutely no benefit to trying to get that right in the camera.

Mark, there is clearly a benefit to getting it right in the camera, which should be the goal. The less you have to adjust the image in post processing, the better. If that fails for whatever reason, then selecting a preset that matches your conditions is an excellent second choice. And if you have to resort to fixing it in post processing, the first choice is always the camera manufacturer's software, which matches the color and tonal curves precisely to the camera. Most third party solutions come pretty darn close, but when accuracy counts - its best to use the mfgr's software. An example of an absolute need for accuracy would be fashion photography and reproductions of fine art - the colors and tones have to be right on the money.

Auto, as noted by the manufacturers and anyone who understands white balance in a digital camera, is only useful over a fairly narrow range - which does not include skylight, incandescent, fluorescent, non-continuous spectrum or other types of artificial light.

So, to qualify what I do, I first look at the circumstances - if I feel that auto could work - it gets set to auto - if there is any question I try to white or gray card the white balance, or use an appropriate preset. If the light source is in the scene, as in a sunset, then its a bit of trial and error, but generally I will look for a mood or interpretive approach anyway.