Question regarding white balance

ibalance said:

I recently tried to do a few things different in photography, so I went on a quick photowalk and set the white balance in camera for every shot, just because I always have used auto wb.

While doing so I started to think about white balance. It can be used to „neutralize“ color temperature, for example very warm (thinking yellow) light. To be fair, I don’t know that I mean by „neutralize“ in this context.

But when shooting in the warm evening light, why are the images still „warm“ (meaning tasteful yellow cast), albeit having the white balance set to exactly that light?

Click to expand...

preset white balance settings are not always going to match the shooting conditions, and are notoriously inaccurate in many applications. For tricky lighting like sunset, etc. shooting RAW or using a custom white balance will produce better results in terms of color accuracy.

ibalance said:

I recently tried to do a few things different in photography, so I went on a quick photowalk and set the white balance in camera for every shot, just because I always have used auto wb.

While doing so I started to think about white balance. It can be used to „neutralize“ color temperature, for example very warm (thinking yellow) light. To be fair, I don’t know that I mean by „neutralize“ in this context.

But when shooting in the warm evening light, why are the images still „warm“ (meaning tasteful yellow cast), albeit having the white balance set to exactly that light?

Click to expand...

If you have got the white balance correct there will be no yellow cast.

White balance is usually used to adjust the colour balance in the camera to compensate for the colour of the light illuminating a purely reflective object.

It becomes more problematic if you are photographing the light sources themselves as well as reflective objects in the scene. This is the case with many evening scenes when the clouds and sky are the main light sources illuminating the rest of the scene.

You are saying that with correct white balance, there will be ne color cast. This is what I thought also. But the evening photos (note: not sunset, just evening light) are still a bit warmer than photos shot a few hours earlier. Does this mean my camera white balance is not working as precise as I have thought? Or is there maybe a limit as to what white balance can correct?

This is what I also read multiple times, so I wanted to test it out by setting custom wb right before each photo. My expectation was to have neutral images, but there is still a warm toning to them. I think it looks great, I just want to understand why this happens, even when setting custom wb.

ibalance said:

You are saying that with correct white balance, there will be ne color cast. This is what I thought also. But the evening photos (note: not sunset, just evening light) are still a bit warmer than photos shot a few hours earlier. Does this mean my camera white balance is not working as precise as I have thought? Or is there maybe a limit as to what white balance can correct?

Click to expand...

As has been stated by other posters, if you set a custom white balance for any given lighting, you won't get a color cast. Evening light won't look warm.

How are you doing the custom white balance? With my camera, you have to take a shot of a white or gray object and store it as a preset; then you set the camera's white balance to that preset. Note that the object you're using has to be in the same light that's illuminating what you're photographing.

Are you using an auto mode? Perhaps your camera doesn't apply custom white balances in some auto modes.

For reference, I never do this myself. I shoot RAW with auto white balance and mung it in Lightroom until I like how it looks. Or, if I really care about color, I shoot an xRite Passport and put a preset in Lightroom.

ibalance said:

You are saying that with correct white balance, there will be ne color cast. This is what I thought also. But the evening photos (note: not sunset, just evening light) are still a bit warmer than photos shot a few hours earlier. Does this mean my camera white balance is not working as precise as I have thought? Or is there maybe a limit as to what white balance can correct?

Click to expand...

It really depends on the scene that you are photographing.

For example, if the foreground is lit by the setting sun, while the background is deep blue sky, and both are equally represented in the picture; then the camera will find an average white balance which might still make the foreground look much warmer than usual.

However, if you take a shot of the foreground only (in sunlight) with no sky in the picture, then the camera should find a white balance that will completely eliminate the warm cast from the setting sun.

I think you need to post an example to get fuller discussion. You say evening light, but not sunset. What do you mean by that? I think an example image would be helpful.

A suggestion for you. Take a sunset using RAW, but with the WB you think you should have used (just for comparitive purposes). Open the RAW and play with the WB setting until it is neutralised. That should give you some idea of what adjustments you need to make if you are shooting JPG.

ibalance said:

This is what I also read multiple times, so I wanted to test it out by setting custom wb right before each photo. My expectation was to have neutral images, but there is still a warm toning to them. I think it looks great, I just want to understand why this happens, even when setting custom wb.

Click to expand...

It depends on what the light you shoot is. If it's at sunset or sunrise, the natural light will have a warm yellow glow. As a result, this yellow light reflects off reflective elements and turns majority of the scene yellow. Thus, your setting will be in the 4800 to 5400 Kelvin range and still look yellow or warm. When twilight comes, everything turns blue and that 4800 to 5400 kelvin will look very blue in that light because the majority of the natural light is a cooler range of 4000K. Thus, to warm that light up, you'll need to boost the WB to 6200 to 7000 Kelvin depending on how blue the scene is.


Make sense? Light changes from day to night during that short period of sunset and twilight. Thus, it covers a huge range of WB. And, it depends on the clouds and location of where you shoot from.

ibalance said:

I recently tried to do a few things different in photography, so I went on a quick photowalk and set the white balance in camera for every shot, just because I always have used auto wb.

While doing so I started to think about white balance. It can be used to „neutralize“ color temperature, for example very warm (thinking yellow) light. To be fair, I don’t know that I mean by „neutralize“ in this context.

Click to expand...

It means that if there is something in the picture that is white in reality it also looks white in the picture (or any neutral colour such as the grey cards you can buy for this purpose).

Member said:

But when shooting in the warm evening light, why are the images still „warm“ (meaning tasteful yellow cast), albeit having the white balance set to exactly that light?

Click to expand...

This depends on how you have set the white balance "to exactly that light". If you have set WB using a neutral card then the light will, indeed, be neutral.

However, the light looks yellow at morning and evening because it travels through more air that disperses blue light and it really is yellow(ish). If you have set WB according to a preset on your camera for that sort of light the camera will retain the yellow cast because that's what people expect to see when taking photos at those times.

ibalance said:

This is what I also read multiple times, so I wanted to test it out by setting custom wb right before each photo. My expectation was to have neutral images, but there is still a warm toning to them. I think it looks great, I just want to understand why this happens, even when setting custom wb.

Click to expand...

Ah, I think I misunderstood your OP where you said you set white balance "in camera", I interpreted that to mean using the camera pre-sets like cloudy, shade, etc. So you were actually using custom WB every time, right?

In that case then there are a couple of other possibilities. First, at sunset if you're shooting a distant landscape scene you may not be able to capture the exact same light in a CWB calibration shot (where you fill the frame completely with one consistent neutral color like white or grey). So that could explain it being off a bit. Also, in any CWB calibration your sample shot has to be illuminated as uniformly as possible, and not overexposed, or it will produce an incorrect WB estimate.

I do this all the time to see what shot I like the best.

WB=Shade





Daylight





Fluorescent +0





incandescent





Fluorescent +1





Cloudy





Fluorescent +2





I chose to work with Florescent +0 (I liked the purple color)



This was shot with the "wrong" white balance, daylight was used with incandescent light bulbs.

St Francis Rd, Jerusalem, Israel, 2014



Aloha,
Val

That's a good set of examples.

There's a lot to be said for shooting everything with the camera set to Daylight, saving a raw file, and then adjusting WB to taste in your processing program.

If you do a shot with a grey card in it, you can use that to set "correct" WB, and then use the same setting for other shots in the same batch. But you may well prefer a setting that is not "correct".

ibalance said:

I recently tried to do a few things different in photography, so I went on a quick photowalk and set the white balance in camera for every shot, just because I always have used auto wb.

While doing so I started to think about white balance. It can be used to „neutralize“ color temperature, for example very warm (thinking yellow) light. To be fair, I don’t know that I mean by „neutralize“ in this context.

But when shooting in the warm evening light, why are the images still „warm“ (meaning tasteful yellow cast), albeit having the white balance set to exactly that light?

Click to expand...

You don't have to waste your time testing the effects of different white balance (WB) settings. There are plenty of web resources describing WB tests under controlled and uncontrolled settings.

Please google "color temperature chart" to get an idea of the color temperature (in degrees Kelvin) of different types of light (sun, shade, incandescent, fluorescent, etc.) . That is the principle behind white balancing.

Often, lighting is mixed, some from warm light (e.g. candle) and some from cool light (e.g. daylight). It's an interesting subject.

However, I am not interested in adjusting WB settings every time I change photo subjects. That is one of the reasons I shoot RAW with WB-auto. There's enough to worry about with focus, lighting, framing, ISO, aperture, and shutter - adding yet another variable that can be adjusted in post processing over-complicates it.

If you shoot JPEG, you can only adjust WB a little; with RAW, you have much greater latitude.