White balance

TonyUSA · Nov 10, 2016

When is the best way to do white balance between setting at the camera or at the editing software?

If I am going to use flash such as at the birthday party. How do you take gray card photo (taking with flash on?)?

Thank you,

astroNikon · Nov 10, 2016

When I do a photoshoot, or more around rooms. I'll lay down a gray, white and black card and take a photo. Then continue shooting. That gives me a baseline for the following pictures that I take.

TonyUSA · Nov 10, 2016

Sorry my question wasn't clear. Ok, after lay down gray, white, and black cards then take photo. Do you adjust white balance(custom white balance) on your camera right away or after you done the shoot then you do white balance on the computer with editing software?

Derrel · Nov 10, 2016

I like to SET the camera to a close approximation of the degrees in Kelvin of the prevailing light source...this helps RAW+JPEG images, and gives preview images on the camera LCD that look "normal".
Use the pre-sets is your camera does not allow Kelvin temp;s to be set: Fine Weather, Incandescent, Fluorescent, Flash, etc.. Set the camera. Shoot RAW or RAW+JPEG in the field.

photo1x1.com · Nov 10, 2016

It sounds strange, but most of the time I set the white balance to daylight. No matter what lighting conditions I shoot in. I do the white balance in lightroom afterwards, that saves me some time when shooting, especially if there are different light sources, or the light source changes a lot during a shooting.
If you balance on a greycard, or all three grey, white and black, and use that to set your white balance in post production, the software will use this point as neutral. In general I like it warmer though and adjust the sliders accordingly after that.
When shooting with flash, daylight white balance setting usually works pretty well (at least with the flashlights I use), but again you can change that later as long as you shoot raw. And yes, I´d rather balance the flash than the available surrounding light.
When shooting with flash, consider setting the exposure for the rest of the room and only use the flash to fill, whenever possible. It will add some grain, if you pump up the ISO, but the image will be much more lively. If you don´t flashlight will light the foreground much more than the background and so the background will be way underexposed, while the people will all be bright - that´s a rather unnatural look. I hope you understand what I mean.

TonyUSA · Nov 10, 2016

Thank you so much everyone for your answer. That helped me a lot.

fmw · Nov 10, 2016

I think you can just set auto white balance. Shoot a raw file along with the jpeg and you can use the raw file to set white balance in the computer if you don't like how the jpeg turned out.

TonyUSA · Nov 10, 2016

Thank you,

snowbear · Nov 10, 2016

I'm in the auto-wb group. I almost always shoot just a raw file and use the LR eyedropper to click on a white or middle-value grey; fine tune if needed.

KmH · Nov 10, 2016

Raw files don't have a white balance.
So it's easy to set using whatever Raw converter it is you use.
But using a good, calibrated gray card, like a WhiBal G7 Certified Neutral White Balance Card sure helps. I used the WhiBal card and an X-Rite ColorChecker Passport. I used X-Rite display calibration hardware/software to keep my editing displays tuned up with regular calibration.

Not all DSLR cameras are good at detecting the light and then choosing a good white balance. Of course when using mixed lighting white balance in some part of a photo will likely be off.

hirejn · Nov 11, 2016

TonyUSA said:
Sorry my question wasn't clear. Ok, after lay down gray, white, and black cards then take photo. Do you adjust white balance(custom white balance) on your camera right away or after you done the shoot then you do white balance on the computer with editing software?

I prefer to record the best possible image in camera, especially if I'm doing color correction myself. I would do a custom white balance in camera and also take a few reference photos of a white card in different areas as a tool to use in post. If you have raw, it technically doesn't matter a lot because you can adjust white balance in post without loss of quality, but not with JPEG. But then you have work to do in post. I prefer to do the work in camera.