expodisk, choises....

[arhgabriel]

<p>hello! few days ago i took some pictures in mixed light sources, and no matter what settings i use the result was far from good. so, i decided that i need an expodisk. i've been looking for ideas over the internet and i'm lost. gray, white, warm... white is better than grey or viceversa ... what good is for you...and so on. could you please, help me with a suggestion ?</p>

[bjscharp]

An expodisk won't help you with mixed light sources. An expodisc is just a more accurate/speedy way of setting a custom WB, if shooting raw and fixing the WB in post won't work, an expodisk or gray card won't help either.

 

The only solution with mixed lighting is either turning of some of the lights or gelling them.

 

Or going B&W of course..

[cabbiinc]

<p>I've got the original version (assume that's white). The warm version is more for portraits and warming skin tones, where as the white is more for the photojournalistic you-get-what-you-see look. Unless you planned on doing studio type portraits I'd just get the white one (haven't looked into the grey one). You can always warm up skin tones in post processing and having the right color balance to begin with is very very handy.</p>

<p>EDIT: BJ is of course correct about it not being the magic bullet in mixed lighting, but it does help a lot in my experience. When your at an event and you have no control over the lighting it does help.</p>

[serguei_fenev]

<p>I agree with Dan - I started to use it when shooting hockey games (you have no control over the lighting at the rink) and it does help a lot - big difference! And you always can fine tune WB in postprocessing later on if you need - so far WB was perfect and I haven't done any adjustments after.</p>

[bobatkins]

<p>There is probably no correct WB for mixed lighting. If you have both daylight and tungsten light illuminating a scene, no WB setting will work. Either the tungsten parts will be too warm or the daylight parts will be too cool or both parts will be wrong. An expodisk won't help.</p>

<p>Shooting RAW and processing in DPP gives you the best chance of optimizing the WB under difficult lighting. If you do that, the camera WB setting doesn't matter.</p>

[hjoseph7]

<p>You can shoot RAW, use the Custom WB with a Grey or White card, use an Expodisc, or plug in the Kelvin numbers yourself, or a combination if you so decide. I found that plugging in the Kelvin numbers gives you about the same, or a little bit more reliability than the Expodisc, but maybe I need more experience in using it . </p>

[cabbiinc]

<p>Personally I shoot RAW with an expodisk. Sometimes I do have to give a tweak or two, but it all depends on what your shooting for (as is the case with many equipment purposes). If you have an expodisk shot to base off of, the tweaking that you do have to do should be minimal. The fact is that if you have CFLs on your left and tungstens on your right your going to record a cold left side and warm right side, but that's what the environment was. Studio fashion work would dictate that you need a consistent white balance, while photojournalism wont, it just depends on what your trying to do.</p>

[arhgabriel]

<p>thank you all for answers, even for the spam one! :) . so i will go for a mix of neutral white expodisk and a white card. cheers !</p>