White balance

Actor · Dec 14, 2009

This happens all the time when shooting indoors with my wife's DSLR. If I were shooting film I'd put an 80A on the lens. Obviously the white balance is off. The question is "why?" Supposedly "auto white balance" is on so this should not be happening. Is the camera malfunctioning? Should I put an 80A on the lens to keep the AWB happy?

IgsEMT · Dec 14, 2009

Film WB is preset. In developing/post processing you can apply various filters or even yank them on the lens, as you said. In Digital, based on camera you're using you can either shoot it raw and correct WB later or preset it b4 shooting. 99.9% of the time I'm shooting with the flash thus on Nikon's I set WB to wither 5560K or Daylight+A2. Image you shown seems to be shot under tungsten light thus your WB should reflect it. I'm not a fan of AWB nor do I recommend it. I try to keep as little auto function on camera as possible. As sophisticated cameras are today, they only "see" things as they are and don't have human brain to interpret information more accurately. But that's my opinion, my preferences and my style of shooting.
good luck

Garbz · Dec 14, 2009

How does auto white balance know you're not photographing something that is mostly yellow? AWB does well when you're in a colour cast and you're photographing a very colour varied subject. But take a look at the scene above. You have a yellow wall, brown jumper, skin tones, and a tiny little red phone which probably didn't even register. AWB hasn't got a clue in this case until it can see some blue and green features that are clearly cast yellow too and then counter the effect.

Even when it works it's often off. AWB works well in cloudy overcast conditions, and more complicated scenes, but really your options here are either preset the white balance on the camera, use a custom white balance reference image from the camera (most can do this), or shoot in RAW allowing you to select your white balance in post processing and ignore the colour cast at the time of shooting.