WhiBal Card with flash?

[Reyna]

Ok, so I've recently purchased the WhiBal card. What I normally do is shoot in RAW, take a few pictures in the same lighting conditions of the WhiBal card, then take pictures. I open all the photos in camera raw, select all photos and adjust the white balance from the WhiBal picture.

My problem is that the pictures I used with my flash on, the white balance is still off. It's so weird. So, is my problem b/c of what I have the white balance set on my camera with the flash on?

Or, what white balance setting am I supposed to use with the WhiBal card. I've googled it but haven't come up with anything....

Thank you!!

 

[480sparky39 38]

Because you're using a preset WB set to ambient lighting, it's not going to be correct for the flash. Find out what the color temp of your flash is, and set those shots to that in post.

 

[Garbz]

The white balance setting of a camera flash changes with flash duration. A flash card will only give you accurate results if you lock your flash at a specific power level.

Your D7000 and SB-600 both support flash white balance through CLS so your camera should (if set to auto) be giving you perfect white balance for the flash already anyway as it compensates for the flash power output.

 

[Big Mike]

Also, we need to consider that when you use flash, you are most likely not shooting in a situation where the ambient light matches the color temp of the light from the flash. Also, because the flash is likely coming from the camera position, it's probably lighting up the subject, but not the background (if it did, it would be much too bright on the subject). The result is that your subject and your background have different color temps and there is probably some mixing going on as well.
So no matter which WB setting you try to adjust to, some part of the image would be wrong.

 

[Reyna]

Thank you so much.

So, if I set my WB to auto that should do the trick with the WhiBal card? When the colors seemed off my WB was set to Daylight b/c flash is balanced for daylight, and well, so is the sun.

Just wanting to get this right....

Also, should my WB be in auto (using the WhiBal card) when I'm not using my flash as well?

 

[bratkinson]

Setting your white balance to "auto" or AWB lets the camera decide what the white balance will be. Taking the picture of your WhiBal card first and then setting custom white balance (CWB) to that picture lets YOU decide what the white balance will be. When taking pictures of your WhiBal card, you need it to fill nearly all or more of the frame. This is because setting a custom white balance takes an 'average' of the picture you tell it to. Note, however, that regardless of what you set in the camera as white balance, whether auto, daylight, shadow, custom, or any other value, it only affects the JPGs the camera produces...NOT the RAW pictures.

Since you took a picture of your WhiBal card and set that in your post program, (you did set the white balance to the RAW image, right?), what your post processing program should have come out right. But, from your initial post, I don't know whether you took a picture of the WhiBal card with the flash or without? White balance must be set to the identical lighting conditions the pictures are shot in. Shots without the flash and shots with the flash are two different white balance levels. I recently shot a family birthday party in a small banquet room at a restaurant that had a full wall of windows and cloudy-bright outside, with curtains open. I took 8 white balance shots...one in each direction, with and without flash, and then post processed all the pictures and set white balance by 'group' of where they were sitting and flash/no flash. There was still some minor 'tweaking' to do to get color consistency across all the pictures.

As for taking pictures of the WhiBal card with your flash, it's probably best to have someone volunteer to hold it and you take their picture...zoomed in such that the card is fills or nearly fills the frame. Then retrieve your card, go back to where you were, and take their picture. One nightmare I had to deal with was taking their picture with the flash with their back to the window. Their holding the WhiBal card effectively set the balance to how the flash was lighting their face. That's all I was looking for. As for the colors of the flowers that were lit from outside...they're close, but not right. I could have done separate white balance treatments on copies of the picture and then put them together, but I don't know how to do that yet.