I have encountered this problem several times, I tend to shoot S Priority as mostly Birds, with Auto ISO and Auto White Balance, but when shooting waterfowl on green water, the image gets a green/yellow cast that seems difficult to either adjust for in Settings or in post-processing. Any suggestions ?
I don’t see a yellow/green color cast on the ducks, although I do see a small amount of green reflected by the water on the lower parts of the second bird. The water looks green, but I would assume that you want to retain the natural color of the water. Is there algae in the water, or is the water surface reflecting foliage located on the other size of the water body?
If you want to remove the color cast *from the water* then white balance is the wrong tool for removing it, as it would put a color cast on the bird, namely, a blue/magenta or purple color; white balance adjusts *all* the colors of an image. Adjusting a color of only one object in a scene requires somewhat more advanced editing skills and tools.
Generally speaking, adjusting white balance manually in software requires a bit of care and some specialized knowledge.
First, you will have difficulty adjusting white balance manually if your screen does not appear to be white to your eyes. When you look at a white object on your screen, for example the background of this website, does it actually look white to you or does it have a color cast, maybe a bluish color? If so, then adjusting color by sight won’t work. Your computer operating system might have a crude adjustment for this, or your monitor, or you could obtain a monitor calibration device for best results, although this is not strictly needed.
White balance is usually implemented by two sliders in software: color temperature, which adjusts between yellow and blue, and tint which adjusts between green and magenta. Combinations of these two adjustments can remove any color cast. I would suggest changing these slowly and by small amounts, giving your eyes a little time to adjust. As the term “white balance” implies, you typically want to adjust the colors so that an objectively neutral color—white, gray, or black—an object which reflects all frequencies of light equally, ends up with all three color numbers equal to each other, so that the red value equals the green and blue values. It’s easier doing this adjustment on the camera, perhaps using a white object like a styrofoam cup, using a manual white balance adjustment. Or, you can take a photo of a white object in the scene and adjust it accordingly on the computer. Some software allows you to click on an object which is supposed to be neutral, and it will calculate the white balance automatically.
As others have mentioned, your photo are slightly over exposed on the ducks. If you shot raw, then perhaps you can recover these highlights with an adjustment, but if you shot with JPEG, then the color information in the highlights is lost. With unrecoverable overexposed highlights, any white balance adjustment is going to be problematic. But as I mentioned, the white balance on the ducks themselves appears to be good.
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