White Balance

[mommy22]

I went for a nice hike the other day with my family and brought the camera along. I used the histogram to tell if I was getting accurate exposures etc, I shot in manual mode, and I set the WB to shade as we were in a forest. I get home and all of my pictures have a jaundiced/liver failure yellow hue. Yuck!!!

Should i have kept the white balance in Auto mode? Is there a way to use the histogram to see if there is one prevalent color? Help! I am too embarrased to even post obe of the pics as an example.

 

[reznap]

I try to keep mine in auto and adjust later on. Works really well when shooting in RAW, but photoshop can do a lot with a jpeg too. Unless you have time to take a picture of a white-something or a gray card and set a custom w/b, I'd leave it on auto.

Got any software to fix it? Sometimes photoshop gets it about right with the auto color and auto tone, sometimes it doesn't.

 

[Hardrock]

If you have photoshop you can open the image in raw and use the WB dropper to try and readjust the WB. You can also adjust the color in hue and saturation or color balance. It may not work as well but should help.

 

[myfotoguy]

In these situations I usually try shade, or cloudy and it usually works, but not always. Maybe it depends on how strong the light above is and if the light shining through is picking up color cast from the foliage????

I do both, shade, cloudy and also switch to auto if those are not cutting it. I have not paid attention enough to see the exact difference in the particular situation. I have gotten used to looking at the image on my camera as a guide though, so I can reasonably tell what it will be on the PC as far as white balance.

Certainly a gray card would be best, but depending on what you are shooting in the forest the color temp could be a bit different from one place to the next, in which case Auto WB then tweaking in post is best anyway, especially if you shoot in RAW. You can still make some good adjustments to a JPEG as long as you are in the ballpark.

Some cameras have various picture controls for hue and things like that. Usually you don’t accidently change those, but you could make sure you didn’t move some of those camera pre-set picture control/style settings to something that caused (or added) to the problem.

 

[syphlix]

just adjust it in post... lightroom/acr does good job of it...

next time just check the lcd preview when you've changed the wb... should be pretty obvious...

 

[KmH]

Should i have kept the white balance in Auto mode?

It depends on the camera. Some do Auto WB better than others.

There are 2 kinds of histogram: the luminance histogram and the RGB histogram.

Again it depends on the camera whether you will have both to choose from. Most entry level cameras only have the luminance histogram which doesn't contain any color information.

As mentioned the color cast can be addressed in image editing software. There are several ways to approach correcting the photos.

Examples would help as would knowing what camera/lens was involved, and if you have any 'protective' filters on the lens.

 

[table1349]

Something that no one else mentioned, you could set a custom white balance for the light you are in. It is still the most accurate method to get proper white balance that I have found for various lighting situations.