White Balance Issue Indoors (mirrorless)

I was shooting in my bedroom which is illuminated by a lamp with a yellow lamp shade (hence yellow lighting). I'm using a Sony a5100 mirrorless camera with a 20mm f2.8 lens. The first shot I took nailed the white balance perfectly, shooting manual mode but with Auto WB set. After that, I took another 20-30 shots and the WB was way off every time. I tried shooting with the same settings as that first photo. I tried tweaking the settings. I tried everything. Almost every photo came out far too yellow. When I used the incandescent setting, that helped but photo was still too yellow. When I got out a white sheet of paper and set a custom white balance, that got close to the accuracy of the first photo but still came up short (not enough red). I was never able to get that perfect color temp no matter what I tried. Was that perfect metering some kind of a fluke that I'll never again be able to duplicate? I wish I could figure out how to get auto white balance to work so great again? Any suggestions?


Perfect color temp (This is what I'm trying to duplicate.)


With the exact same settings as above, photo came out too yellow. Endless changes to the settings yielded different levels of too-yellow photos


The only way I could rid the yellow problem was getting a sheet of white paper and setting a custom white balance. It's still not as accurate as that first auto white balance photo (color temp is a bit too cool).

You can just set it manually until you think it looks right. If you look through your WB menu there is a setting that allows you to set the color temperature.

Personally i just shoot in raw so that i can correct it if need be later.
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Good luck and happy shooting!

thebustos said:

You can just set it manually until you think it looks right. If you look through your WB menu there is a setting that allows you to set the color temperature.

Personally i just shoot in raw so that i can correct it if need be later.

Click to expand...

This is one situation where shooting in raw really makes life a lot easier. In Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw you can just copy the white balance settings from the one perfect shot to all the others - it takes about 30 seconds.

In modern day most camera could do a very good job on Auto White Balance (AWB). Might be there is small issue with your particular model that I'm not familiar with.

But it is very sure that white paper is not white. Not to set WB on a white paper as here.

Quote: "Typing/printer paper isn’t designed with photography in mind. .... One of the ways that paper manufacturers make paper whiter is to add optical brightening agents (OBAs) to the paper when it’s produced. OBAs are fancy dyes that absorb UV light and emit visible blue light. The result is that the paper appears bluer, which for some odd reason makes it also appear whiter and brighter." Unquote

A couple of easy solutions:

1) use the pre-set white balance (by the live view of mirrorless you can see the instant WB change).

2) point your camera towards your scene, set the should-be-white sector as the custom WB.

3) if you wish to set WB before start shooting, might use those WB adjuster (very often in the form of lens front cap, point the camera towards lighting source and set the WB). Mine was just a few US$ only and is very accurate.

Chris R-UK said:

thebustos said:

You can just set it manually until you think it looks right. If you look through your WB menu there is a setting that allows you to set the color temperature.

Personally i just shoot in raw so that i can correct it if need be later.

Click to expand...

This is one situation where shooting in raw really makes life a lot easier. In Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw you can just copy the white balance settings from the one perfect shot to all the others - it takes about 30 seconds.

Click to expand...

You can also adjust JPGs in ACR and LR. Small changes in colour temperature like those wanted by the OP will work fine.

You just move the blue/yellow slider a little way toward the blue, until it looks right. Take care as it is easy to overdo such corrections.

Where raw files show their strength is if major corrections to tonality or dynamic range are needed.

If you are not starting from Adobe Bridge, you may need to change a preferences setting somewhere to make JPGs and TIFs open in ACR.

alcelc said:

In modern day most camera could do a very good job on Auto White Balance (AWB). Might be there is small issue with your particular model that I'm not familiar with.

But it is very sure that white paper is not white. Not to set WB on a white paper as here.

Quote: "Typing/printer paper isn’t designed with photography in mind. .... One of the ways that paper manufacturers make paper whiter is to add optical brightening agents (OBAs) to the paper when it’s produced. OBAs are fancy dyes that absorb UV light and emit visible blue light. The result is that the paper appears bluer, which for some odd reason makes it also appear whiter and brighter." Unquote

Click to expand...

I'll snip another quote from that article:

"The results are pretty clear to me, even though this wasn’t very scientific."

I stopped reading at that point.

It looks to me as though there is some daylight (or at least another light source) coming into the first image, and that may be affecting the wb selected by the camera. The same wb without the daylight would likely give a different look.

Incidentally, out side of product photography, there is really no such thing as a "correct" white balance, just what pleases you.

Dave

Kudos to Dave. The tv was on and that served as another light source and affected the WB of the original photo such that it could never be duplicated later when the tv was off.

Just to go through the exercise, I stuck the RAW file from image #2 into LR and adjusted the temp, tint and exposure so it matched the first photo. There weren't any values to "copy" from the original RAW, it was a matter of moving sliders until I saw it as being a match.

If I was to do this shoot again, I would turn off the tv, and then customize the WB in the camera. Either I would choose the incandescent setting and fine tune from there or just pull out a white t-shirt, shoot that and then fine tune from that custom setting.

I'll look into some WB accessories like grey cards and such. I never knew about WB lens caps which look like a convenient alternative.

terp313 said:

Kudos to Dave. The tv was on and that served as another light source and affected the WB of the original photo such that it could never be duplicated later when the tv was off.

Just to go through the exercise, I stuck the RAW file from image #2 into LR and adjusted the temp, tint and exposure so it matched the first photo. There weren't any values to "copy" from the original RAW, it was a matter of moving sliders until I saw it as being a match.

If I was to do this shoot again, I would turn off the tv, and then customize the WB in the camera. Either I would choose the incandescent setting and fine tune from there or just pull out a white t-shirt, shoot that and then fine tune from that custom setting.

I'll look into some WB accessories like grey cards and such. I never knew about WB lens caps which look like a convenient alternative.

Click to expand...

Terp313, just out of curiosity how close is this to what you wanted?





I only ask because this was a one step "auto color" adjustment in Photoshop of the second picture you posted.

No camera does a perfect job with auto white balance and this simple action in Photoshop may help you, if you want to shoot JPEG instead of raw.

Also, there are post processing programs like Paint Shop, that allows a person to adjust white balance with a JPEG image.

Anyway, this might not even be close to what you're looking for but I just thought I'd bring it up as an option.

terp313 said:

Kudos to Dave. The tv was on and that served as another light source and affected the WB of the original photo such that it could never be duplicated later when the tv was off.

Just to go through the exercise, I stuck the RAW file from image #2 into LR and adjusted the temp, tint and exposure so it matched the first photo. There weren't any values to "copy" from the original RAW, it was a matter of moving sliders until I saw it as being a match.

If I was to do this shoot again, I would turn off the tv, and then customize the WB in the camera. Either I would choose the incandescent setting and fine tune from there or just pull out a white t-shirt, shoot that and then fine tune from that custom setting.

I'll look into some WB accessories like grey cards and such. I never knew about WB lens caps which look like a convenient alternative.

Click to expand...

Terrific analysis by Dave Stott. Never would have thought of another light source being the reason.

Terp313, setting WB using your camera's incandescent WB setting should provide excellent WB in incandescent light with no other light sources. If not, there is something wrong with your camera. You should not have to resort to using custom WB for normal incandescent lighting.

BTW, does your lamp have a standard incandescent light bulb?

Sky

When you open a RAW file in LR you see the white balance values.

Let's say you had 2850 K and Tint +5 (towards magenta). You can copy these values to any othe file or you can type them in. If you don't have the RAW it is very difficult because you already have a white balance in that file so you have to alter it.

You you don't have an old fashioned incandescent bulb there are hundreds of slightly different WB for that light depending on the time in th cycle of the bulb (a cycle is 1/50 s or 1/60 s depending on the frequency of your power supply) when the picture was taken.

That's a major improvement from image #2. However it's still showing a bright yellow tint which my eye does not see. My bed sheets are more of a cream color. You can see the vendor's image at Amazon if you select beige. What my eye saw was a cream colored bed sheet that was slightly warmed up by the lamp light. That's where image #1 shows that warmth where the other two don't. It may be a tad warmer than reality and show a very slight pink cast but it was a very good and pleasing reproduction I thought.

Sky, here's a snapshot of the lamp. It's an LED bulb with a beige lamp shade.

If I compare the WB values in LR, image 1 is about a 100 points warmer and has one less point of tint. If I modify image 2 to have the exact same values, it ends up being much warmer. I'm not sure if that's caused by the variation in light source or just inconsistency with how the values were captured. I had to manually adjust sliders to make the photos match.

I never took into account the cycle of the light bulb. Since I was taking a photo in low light, and trying to capture the tone of the light, I had to use a very show shutter speed. 1/15 is pretty much the slowest I can go shooting handheld and with a lens that doesn't have OSS.

There's a lot said about using the various (manufacturers' idea of what it should be) settings in your camera and I suppose some of them might be fairly accurate but they can only ever be someone else's idea of what might be about right.

One problem with using these pre-sets is that, outside of a controlled environment, you need to constantly change them, sometimes as often as every shot.

Not much fun and even less so when you forget to reset the WB (you will do this at some point and more than once!) and **** up a shot that you can't replicate.

Auto white balance does a pretty good job almost all of the time and I think that your shot is unfortunately one of those occasions when it hasn't really worked.

You don't say whether you shoot raw but that really is the way to go.

"It's good to be . . . . . . . . . Me!"

Therefore you don't have the RAW, just the JPEG.

You should enable Auto-Sync to edit more images with the same settings. JPEG is very difficult because you had different WB to start with. I would try to do a point WB on something that is white or neutral (gray).

Here are the photos to Auto WB in LR (in the same order)


-24 (Cooler) -12 (Greener) +0,33 EV




-42 (cooler) +2 (toward magenta) +0,5 EV




-12 (Cooler) +4 (toward magenta) +1 EV

As you see all were were warmer than expected. I guess in the first photo there was another light source (should explain the shift toward magenta).

--
Victor
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terp313 said:

Sky, here's a snapshot of the lamp. It's an LED bulb with a beige lamp shade.

Click to expand...

Hi terp313,

Thanks for posting the picture. That's a compact fluorescent lamp(CFL), not an incandescent light bulb. CFLs can vary in color temperature range but commonly are higher in color temperature than incandescent light bulbs (which can also vary in color temperature somewhat).

Typical incandescent light bulbs emit light at color temperatures of about 2700 - 2800 Kelvin.

CFLs commonly emit light at higher color temperatures. Here's a chart from Wikipedia's write up on CFLs:

Name ................... Color temperature in Kelvin
Warm/soft white ... ≤ 3,000
(Bright) white .......... 3,500
Cool white ............... 4,000
Daylight ................≥ 5,000

So the color temperature of the CFL in your lamp depends on what was purchased.

That explains why the your camera's white balance incandescent setting did not result in proper white balance.

Thanks,
Sky

Also, the Kelvin temperature of your CFL bulb may be printed on its base/side. CFLs are not known for good color rendition, and at higher shutter speeds their flickering can come into play.