Custom white balance...it is realy important?

[patricklavoie]

Hi, quick question. I shoot RAW, and i know that when you shoot in RAW none of the setting

(sharpen, contrast and white balance) are kept in the file, or at least can be redefine in

ACR...why should i bother to make a custom white balance then? thanks for your info.

[ray]

If you blow out one of the channels due to incorrect white balance (or incorrect expsure), you

cannot recover in ACR. In other words, if highlight details have gone to white (255, 255,

255), then there is no detail to recover by fiddling in ACR.

 

Do it right the first time.

[michaelmowery]

It is good to do if you have the time and if you need the whites to be white. I never have the

time and most times i don't like pure white. But the more you can do in camera the better for

the file and less work for you in processing. But in short don't worry man be happy.

 

Michael http://www.michaelmowery.com

[BrettPrucha]

White balance like all of the other settings you mentioned are done in software. Changing the white balance in camera is still a software settting. White balance "in camera" means putting an 80A filter over the lens to compensate for tungeston lighting.

[briany]

Shourya's response is wrong. The white balance has nothing to do with the sensor's ability to record light. If you're shooting JPG, then Shourya is right, but in RAW it has zero effect. If you get the white balance right in-camera, then you will ostensibly have less work to do when converting the RAW files. I find, however, that I manually tweak white balance for every shot anyway, even if it's only a few hundred K, so I rarely worry about white balance.

 

Brett's answer is pretty much right, and I never use color correction filters on lenses b/c it's just too much hassle. But one note -- if you're shooting in very very yellow light, adjusting white balance will not be as effective as using a blue filter. Because there is so little data recoreded in the blue channel (it's severely underexposed), the blue channel is very noisy, and when the channel gets boosted in the white balance, the noise may be objectionable. By placing a color correction filter on the lens, you reduce red and green light that reaches the sensor as well, bringing all three channels down to an even level. You then have to expose for longer, but none of the channels will be underexposed.

[michaelmowery]

shourya, Patrick is only speaking of white balance. Blowing out the high lights is done only by

over exposure not white balancing. But yes you are right anything 255,255,255 and above

are gone forever. Also white balance is not restricted to only tugstun lighting. Any light can

be white balanced.

 

Michael http://www.michaelmowery.com

[Ed_Ingold]

A custom white balance can be useful in a difficult situation. Typically, you have problems when the light source has a line spectrum (fluorescent, metal-vapor, etc), is filtered or simply doesn't seem to look right on the LCD. It's not a bad idea to have a grey card handy when you are out and about. Normal white balance adjustments assume the light behaves like black-body radiation.

 

The newest Nikon DSLRs, especially the D2x and D2hs, do an excellent job measuring the color of daylight conditions and incandescent light, even very dim incandescent light.

 

You can ratchet up a step (or many steps) using a Gretag-MacBeth Color Checker chart instead of a grey card.

[bill_fouche]

"White balance" setting does NOT affect the raw file captured by the camera. It provides an informational EXIF tag only. It has zero effect on the quality of the capture, affecting only the way the image initially appears in the RAW converter, i.e., the "as shot" setting. "Custom WB" has a meaning only for images converted to JPEG or TIF in-camera. The closest thing to this for RAW captures is to photograph a neutral grey card (or similar) in the lighting conditions of the shoot, and then use that photograph for "click-white-balance" in the RAW converter.