white balance

I'm having a problem with my indoors photos coming out yellow. I read somewhere

that setting my white balance with a grey card could help this problem. So my

question now is, with my camera Nikon D50 is there a setting where I can do the

grey card thing and save that, to shoot in that white balance setting over and

over? Sorry I'm a newbie, so I am certain I am not using the correct

terminology here. Please bear with me :)

Sounds like you're shooting indoors with light being provided by tungsten bulbs (good old fashioned light bulbs). They cast a warmer, yellower light. While you COULD go to the trouble of shooting a white-balance shot on the right magic card, it will probably be easier to just change your camera's white balance setting to the pre-existing setting it has for use with incandescent lighting. That's such a commone requirement that the camera is already set up to do that for you... just like you can tell it to use daylight, or florescent, or flash white balancing. It really does work!

Using Adobe Camera Raw, I've got pretty good balance for tungsten lighting by including a grey card in one tungsten lit shot, and then using ACR's white balance dropper on that card. I then save the settings, and specify to only save the white balance. You can give it a descriptive name and subsequently apply it to any similar lit shots.

I recommend Expo-Disc. I use it, I love it.

 

http://www.expodisc.com/index.php

 

I have no association with the company, I am simply a fan of the product.

There are a couple of ways of altering the white balance, first using the white balance set to K, then tweak it up or down to get the deired effect. But the way I do it is to get a piece of white paper and place it next what you want to shoot, then set your wb to PRE and press and hold the wb button till it starts to flash in the lcd display, with the paper filling the frame just take a shot and the display should come up saying 'good' if it does that then your wb is set. You can do this as often as you like, indoors outdoors where ever. Just remember to do it every time you shoot in different scenarios.

Before you mess with gadgets to get white balance I would suggest that you adjust the camera's white balance control to something which looks like a small domestic light bulb [incandescent] ... this is the tungsten light setting and may well solve most of your problems .. but afterwards remember to return it to Auto otherwise outdoor shots will be dreadfully blue. You camera also has a manual [ PRE] position so you can follow the suggestions above if the simple solution doesn't work :-) The white balance button is next to bottom on back of camera and you twirl the knob to make adjustments. Button has 'WB' next to it.

Auto White Balance does not correct the color under this type of light. Check out the suggestions listed above and determine which works best for you. I have used all of them and you get good results under this type light with the correct White Balance setting. I have both an ExpoDisc and WhiBal card.

The excerpt below comes from Ken Rockwell's <a href="http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d50/d50-settings.htm">D50 User's Guide.</a>

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<i>To set the D50 to give accurate color under any arbitrary weird combination of lighting you can use a manual white balance mode called PRE(set). It's shown as the PRE icon on the far right of the top LCD, just past the Shade icon. Spin the knob while holding WB until you get to PRE. Release the button. Press and hold the WB button again for several seconds until it makes PRE blink. Point the camera at something white or gray that's in the same light as the subject and press the shutter. If "Gd" flashes you're good. If "nG" (no good) flashes, try again.</i>

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