White balance and sunsets

[Desi]

Curious how you handle situations where light is very colorful.

I admit that white balance issues still cause me a lot of confusion.

In incandescent lighting, there is excess yellow and a grey card is useful in quantifying and removing that excess color. Orb you can use a preset WB setting, or auto white balance......or just eyeball it for artistic effect.

How do you folks handle sunsets, or blue hour for that matter?

A grey card, I think, is useless in a sunset, as it would just tell you that you have too much red/orange/yellow. Doesn't auto white balance also take away from the sunset colors? I have heard that setting white balance to "sunny day" in a sunset will give a more accurate color representation.

 

[EIngerson]

Auto white balance.

 

[Derrel]

I set to a FIXED WB, like Daylight, so that the beautiful, colored light is not "white balanced away" to dull and neutral.

 

[Robin Usagani]

I make my white look a little yellow.

 

[KmH]

What is the "blue hour"?

 

[Desi]

Thanks guys...

Eric, AWB is what I've been using. I've started switching to daylight in post and the images look nicer.....but I wasn't sure if that wasn't just some sort of trickery on my part.

KmH: Blue hour is the time between twilight and frank night-time when there is still enough light to get a bright image with a long exposure, but the color cast is very blue. Looked it up to make sure I wasn't completely full of it. So, here's an unimpeachable reference: Blue hour - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Derrel]

What is the "blue hour"?

The Oregon coast often has gorgeous blue hour conditions.

 

[bratkinson]

It's been several years since I took a couple of shots of the sunset itself while passing through Arizona and approaching some mountains. I didn't know anything about WB back then, nor even anything about RAW, either. So I just let the 30D I had at the time use AWB and the pictures were OK. I then fooled with the WB and individual color settings in the ancient, freebie Photoshop LE I got with my G-3 some years earlier. I simply 'played' until I got results I liked. These days, I think I'd probably do the same thing. But I'd be shooting RAW+JPG as I usually do. So if I really wanted to 'play with' the results, I'd try to find something in the foreground I could set WB with in Lightroom and then 'fiddle around' until I liked it. I might even give my Expodisk a try at setting custom WB under those conditions as well to see what it produces. Expodisk works by shooting -towards- the light source, so a multicolored sunset would be a great way to set WB, in my estimation.

On the other hand, shooting subjects front-lit by sunset coloring or blue hour, such as people at a gathering, the obvious solution would be a grey card or X-Rite Color Checker. But if the goal is to have the subjects backlit by the sunset such as a beach shot, I'd opt for a grey card/Color Checker shot after I had a reflector(s) in place to get the sunlight lighting the subjects faces for a proper exposure, then tone down the highlights of the sunset itself in post processing as that would be somewhat overexposed.

 

[ann]

I have run several test to show in my classes and when it comes to sunsets, i recommend cloudy or shady, never auto or even daylight. However, that is going to depend on one's personnal taste.
Why not run a test for yourself. Just shoot in raw and make the changes with soft ware and then put them up on your screen together and you should have your answer

With regard to the blue hour there is a website that will give you the times for various places all over the world as to one it will occur .

Most folks don't pay attention to that time of "day/night" but once you see it , it is easy to spot .

 

[abovenormphotos]

Shoot in RAW! Then setting the WB will be a moot point.

 

[bratkinson]

Shoot in RAW! Then setting the WB will be a moot point.

No....WB must STILL be set in post...set to some values. The question is...set to WHAT? Granted, the color/temperature sliders can be adjusted to suit ones' taste, but for those with limited post processing experience and/or software, the solution for shooting with JPG output remains the same as the film days...get it right in the camera.

 

[bratkinson]

I have run several test to show in my classes and when it comes to sunsets, i recommend cloudy or shady, never auto or even daylight. However, that is going to depend on one's personnal taste.
Why not run a test for yourself. Just shoot in raw and make the changes with soft ware and then put them up on your screen together and you should have your answer

Shooting in RAW allows the greatest flexibility in post processing, but what about those limited to JPG only? I didn't even know what RAW was until about 3 years ago or so. I was perfectly content to 'play with' the JPGs in post.

So, why not try some tests? Or, lacking sufficient 'test' time such as a vacation in Hawaii without computer access, shoot the pictures with several different settings. Setting the camera to cloudy or shady is an excellent starting point. But one thing I've noticed in my progression to newer and more expensive cameras, the quality/accuracy of AWB in my Canon cameras has improved dramatically with each successive model. The JPG results SOOC are surprisingly good WB, even under the 'mixed' lighting I get in some areas used for indoor church events. I strongly suspect that the AWB results would be noticeably different from camera maker to camera maker as well as newer vs older models, and perhaps even firmware updates!

Note, too, that the colors of sunset change dramatically while it's happening. Clouds move in, the sun gets lower thereby illuminating the bottoms of the clouds, your location is changing (I was shooting through lexan windows on a moving Amtrak train!), you name it. The WB settings of 5 minutes previous will not likely be the same as right now, or 5 minutes later. And, don't forget that no two sunsets are alike...just like snowflakes!

The first two shots below were in Puerto Rico with a Canon G-3. The last one, in Arizona with a 30D.

 

[Desi]

Thanks, everyone, for your comments on here. There's some good stuff to think about.

True, the color of a sunset changes by the minute.....so no preset will ever be accurate to give the "correct" color. It seems that the "right" white balance is a matter of taste and the accuracy of your memory.

Using cloudy WB would add more yellow and warm up the sunset. Auto WB seems to cool it off some. I had heard that the daylight setting gives a more "accurate" colors.

Maybe the benefit of using a fixed WB setting is simply so that all your photos start at the same temp and tint.

I'll have to spend some more time on this question.

Thanks all

Desi

 

[cmarie87]

What about a custom white balance? I've had pretty good experience with that.

 

[hirejn]

I use the daylight WB preset. It's easy to go out and try this yourself, however. You want to capture the colors of sunset, so you don't want to balance them out by using a white card. Sunset light is more yellow so white objects will have a golden hue, which is technically incorrect but artistically more desirable. To preserve the color, use daylight white balance so the camera doesn't compensate and the hues remain warm. Shooting RAW is useful for unlimited WB latitude in post so you can get it exactly how you want. You can use WB to change the scene to fit your needs. When you want to warm it up, raise the Kelvin numbers. When you want to cool it down, lower them.

The further you move the Kelvins away from the color temperature of the source, the more the colors shift and whites are no longer white. As you move them higher, the image warms; as you move them lower, it cools. In most cases, you want to shift WB to balance whites and keep them white. Daylight is daylight. If you match the preset to the source, you get white whites. And like with any other source, if the color temperature changes or you move the Kelvins away, you get a color shift. So if you're set to daylight WB, and the colors shift toward sunset, the shift will register on the negative. Technically, to keep whites white, you'd balance this out. The difference is with sunset the shift is desirable, so you don't want to balance it out. Therefore you set the WB to match the source, which is the sun, hence the daylight or sun preset, and you let the shift occur. Whites are orange or whatever color the sunset is, and the WB is technically incorrect but artistically desirable. This is technically a WB trick because it involves creative override of technically correct WB, and there are many other WB tricks.