hirejn wrote:
I have a blog post on this coming up, but I haven't picked a date to publish it. Generally, choose a preset that describes the lighting condition, such as daylight, cloudy. That gets you in the ballpark. There's no such thing as unfixable WB with RAW. RAW has no white balance or color space. You set that in post. What you see on the LCD is the JPEG generated from the RAW file with WB and color space embedded. So it does make a difference.
The other benefit to using presets is that WB doesn't change much within a certain light. For example, if you're in daylight, moving the camera 10 feet left or right doesn't really change the WB of the scene. It may change what the camera sees and therefore thinks the WB is, but the actual WB is still daylight. So presets give you more consistency, meaning you have fewer adjustments to make in post. If you use auto, you could technically get a slightly different WB every time you point the camera at something else.
Do not use any white object for custom WB. This is a common mistake. Most white objects are not truly white. Our eyes make them white, but cameras will see different dyes and variances even in the whitest paper. A good white card is coated with a special paint that's color neutral. That's what you want. If you're going to guess at custom WB, you might as well not do it.
