The problem with auto white balance and flash (particularly
external flash, but somewhat with the built-in flash) is the
variation from shot to shot. If you are only taking one or two
shots it doesn't matter much. But I am fairly sure that most people
reading these forums shoot lots of pictures.
Say you are at a family birthday party, shooting flash. In auto
white balance mode the camera sensor picks up the light from both
the ambient (lamps, windows, etc) and flash light. The camera tries
the neutralize the tint with auto white balance. Now you take a
second picture, a few feet away from the first. The proportions of
flash and ambient light will now be different. Camera again tries
to neutralize the tint. The individual photos may look pretty good,
but when set next to each other the skin tones of one or the other
are off. Now repeat this for 50 or 500 shots. You end up with skin
tones of all differnt colors, many look ok in isolation, but as a
group look terrible.
Ah! you say, just correct the white balance in software after
shooting. Yes you can do this, but it is still almost impossible to
get a good result when all are a little differerent.
The solution: Use manual white balance. For most indoor shots with
the 2100 the clouds setting looks best in my setup. Now what
happens is that there will be a natural variation in skin tones
depending on the lighting, just like what your eye sees. Not only
that, if there is a tint problem (i.e. you picked fluorescent WB
rather than clouds) you can apply the same amount of correction to
ALL your pics from that shoot at one time. Many software packages
can apply a correction automatically to all the files in a
directory. Far faster, easier, and gets a better result.
Holland
"cheat-sheets"...8)
...can you elaborate on using the manual WB settings with the 2100
that has set WB modes, and/or the 2040, that has color
correction?...or is it all too variable to suggest anything but
trial and error?...
