WB Confuzzeled

smoke665

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The other day I was in the shade, down in a deep ravine. I shot my WB targets and left the camera in auto WB. When I imported to LR I used the eye dropper tool to first click on the white. It sent my temperature over 12,000 and the tone slider way to the right. I then clicked on the 18% gray. Temperature went to over 14,000 and the tone slider pegged right. The images looked horrible. Finally manually set to 6500 and a slight adjustment to tone.

There was a greenish phosphorescent quality everywhere. Could this be what was causing this? Never had this happen before or since.
 
Any others experience this and what did you do to counteract????
 
Post the uncorrected and I'll see what I get.

I've run into instances where things were lightly different than "I remembered" but that's not always reliable. I typically don't have the grey card so I'll look for a patch of grey in the scene. Failing that, I'll take white or black, and they seem to work fine. I haven't noticed any real difference between them.
 
Could this be what was causing this? Never had this happen before or since.
I feel your frustrations, but also take some comfort in the fact that I'm not alone in getting extremely inconsistent results using a gray card for white balance.

You may recall I had similar issues when taking some outdoor family photos last year and eventually just gave up on the gray card altogether.
Family portraits - C&C

Prior to that, I had other issues with my various gray cards that never seemed to produce reliable or consistent results.
Setting white balance with a gray card

Since you said you were in a ravine with a green cast, I'm wondering if perhaps there was a reflection from plants or trees that was throwing the exposure way off.

I finally just stopped using gray cards and either get as close as I can in post, or if I really want a reference I will use a styrofoam plate, which really is the purest white with no color casts. I just need to underexpose the plate so the highlights don't get blown out.
 
I can't say that I have had this exact scenario happen but I have issues with the WB when using my color checker passport. I have watched video's, read the instructions and talked with people and still confused by it.

In my case, when I use it under the same lighting, the images come out too warm to me. For instance, my skin tone would be way too red even with no red in the frame.
 
How big is the sample area you're using to set the WB in post? If it's only one pixel, that one pixel may be way off from a true neutral gray. Sample a larger area, such as 9x9 pixels or more.
 
@ronlane I have had times when sampling the whit, gray and black give different temperatures. Normally I manually adjust to somewhere in between, and pleasing to the eye

@adamhiram Normally I seldom have a wide variation. I suspect it has to do with all the "green" and the shade throwing everything off
 
in post to

You know that's a good question, for which I don't have a good answer. Away from the house and computer till later today will check on that.
 
@snowbear Away from computer. Will check later today.
 
How big is the sample area you're using to set the WB in post? If it's only one pixel, that one pixel may be way off from a true neutral gray. Sample a larger area, such as 9x9 pixels or more.

Looks like with LR, the color picker is a 5x5 pixel selection. I am trying to see if this can be changed.
 
@ronlane I have had times when sampling the whit, gray and black give different temperatures. Normally I manually adjust to somewhere in between, and pleasing to the eye

@adamhiram Normally I seldom have a wide variation. I suspect it has to do with all the "green" and the shade throwing everything off

I was working on this yesterday afternoon and I was finding that when I left the WB and went to HSL and pulled back the Saturation of the skin about -15 on the red and -3 on the yellow that it looked much better.
 
@ronlane looks like white balance and color sampler are not quite the same both are 5x5 but WB is image pixels and color sampler is screen pixels. I haven't been home to check but supposedly WB sample size can be changed. the WB tool allows you to change the scale of the sample size...when WB tool is active, check the bottom of the Tool Bar...you'll see a Scale slider that will change the pixels to be used for WB sampling.

I do know that if the cards are angled to the lens you can have some significant differences in samples on the cards
 

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