Correcting Colour

[seahawk]

You can do a custom WB, or shoot RAW and adjust the WB at home . as you need.

[PMN]

I have learn t AWB doesn't do a very good job in inclement weather.

Then play with settings and find something that does. The basic settings couldn't be clearer; Sunlight is obviously appropriate when it's sunny, Cloudy is obviously appropriate when it's cloudy, etc. This is exactly what I mean when I say fiddle with settings and see what works best. All I and others can do is try give you as much technical guidance as we can and try help you understand your camera a little better; you have to do the hard part! That said, the hard part can actually be quite fun and it's a great feeling when you finally nail something you know you've worked hard for.

Custom WB will try its best to make the whites appear white in every condition. As with most things, it won't always be perfect (especially when a scene contains different colour temperatures like sodium lights on a ramp and fluorescent lights through terminal windows), but I find my Canons are usually incredibly good as far as WB is concerned and most modern DSLR's will be good as well. The TAP image I posted needed no correction whatsoever, that's exactly how it came out of the camera and you can see how different it looked with Auto WB (they're actually the same image, I just matched the colour temperature on the first example with the previous frame so you can see the difference on the same photo, the second is with in-camera Custom WB correction). So basically, if you shoot JPEG and don't want to venture into RAW quite yet then whenever you're taking shots in strange light (like through tinted windows) try use Custom (again, read your manual and be sure you know exactly how to do this because doing it wrong may be more harmful than good!) For more normal shooting maybe try using other WB modes according to the conditions. The two you should only ever really need to switch between are Sunlight and Cloudy, so maybe see if that gives you better results than Auto.

And of course as Stefan says there's always shooting RAW, although even as an exclusive RAW shooter I still Custom WB in awkward lighting conditions because it means less to do in editing. I'm a real pedant (roughly meaning awkward fussy twat) when it comes to getting it right in the camera!

Paul

[Rtyrpics]

Hiya Paul,
I learnt very quick RAW was more flexible hence I've used it since the second time I switched my camera on .

No more questions now, just plenty to chew on and play with.
Thanks
RT

[sst001]

Seahawk is absolutely right - use custom white balance.

In the interim, use RAW for the images and you can tweak the white-balance on those and discover what works. Or otherwise, use a grey card. If you have existing RAW images, you can play around with this already in Photoshop Camera Raw.

In cloudy conditions, you use warmer colour temperatures in the 5000-5300K range. In sunlight, use cooler colour temperatures in the 4500-4800K range.

Of course, tweak to suit the conditions. Even if you don't get WB correct right away, any subsequent colour casts are easier to correct. Personally, I always use preset manual colour temperatures.

However, in my opinion - never ever correct a colour cast that is natural (eg, sunset). This will make the image look very artificial.

Regards,
Chris.