I have recently bought two used & fairly old Sigma lenses in a camera store. They work mechanically fine and everything, but the images I get from them seem to have a yellowish-greenish color cast when compared to the Nikon kit lenses I have. Can this really be the lenses, or is the camera (D50) just metering WB not so well?
I would guess that if the lenses were causing some kind of color cast, the in camera WB metering should compensate for this - shouldn't it?
I'm not acquainted with Sigma, but lenses can definitely produce color casts- sometimes good and sometimes not so. For my eye Canon lenses are very slightly "warmer" than Nikon lenses, for example. Filters are much worse about it, and perhpas in support of the insight about differences in brands, the color castes of polarizing or ND filters are more noticeable on some brands of lenses than others. An engineer friend with a photographic bent says it's due to the formulations in the glass used to make specific lenses, but I haven't read anything to confirm or deny his assertion.
As for the WB of the D50 compensating, maybe and maybe not. I've owned Canon, Fuji and Nikon DSLR's and each seemed to have specific (and different between brands) lighting conditions in which white balance was a little iffy. The answer with each is to do a custom or manual WB adjustment. I'm not acquainted with the D50, but the procedure should be in the manual. It's quick and easy with all the others I've owned. Definitely worth the trouble to learn to do it, as it will save you endless hours changing color balance in Photoshop.
There are two ways (at least I've found two) to tweak the output - one is to change Hue via the optimization menu, the other is to use WB Bracketing. Which one would you use?
I'd be inclined to use the Hue rather than the bracketing, assuming it let me "dial in" a standard correction for the Sigmas, then dial it out when using another lens. The WB bracketing sounds like something that would EAT memory card capacity while trebling the # of images you had to sort.
Discussion
3 repliesI have recently bought two used & fairly old Sigma lenses in a camera store. They work mechanically fine and everything, but the images I get from them seem to have a yellowish-greenish color cast when compared to the Nikon kit lenses I have. Can this really be the lenses, or is the camera (D50) just metering WB not so well?
I would guess that if the lenses were causing some kind of color cast, the in camera WB metering should compensate for this - shouldn't it?
Thanks for any input...
Basil
As for the WB of the D50 compensating, maybe and maybe not. I've owned Canon, Fuji and Nikon DSLR's and each seemed to have specific (and different between brands) lighting conditions in which white balance was a little iffy. The answer with each is to do a custom or manual WB adjustment. I'm not acquainted with the D50, but the procedure should be in the manual. It's quick and easy with all the others I've owned. Definitely worth the trouble to learn to do it, as it will save you endless hours changing color balance in Photoshop.
There are two ways (at least I've found two) to tweak the output - one is to change Hue via the optimization menu, the other is to use WB Bracketing. Which one would you use?
Basil