3500 / 3000 colour balance

[graham]

Can anyone offer me a few words of wisdom on colour balance setting.

My observation on my 3500 are you need to tell the camera when it is a cloudy day, it guesses other situations OK. Also I was not over impressed with a manual option, does the kind of white paper and how angle it make any difference?

 

[Timo Autiokari]

My observation on my 3500 are you need to tell the camera when it
is a cloudy day, it guesses other situations OK.

There is not much difference in the real life between sunny and cloudy day, (cloudy here means sky full of clouds). So there is no much difference in the digicam either between these settings.

One related thing... it is not always desirable to use the whitepoint control to make the illumination colorless (R=G=B), many times the color of the illumination is excatly what makes the scene so nice. So it may be better to just shoot at "sunny".

Also I was not over impressed with a manual option, does the
kind of white paper and how angle it make any difference?

Angle no, glossy print papers usually do have a hue, use normal "xerox" paper (no matter if it has black text on it or not) or graycard. When it is needed the manual WB option is very good and really fast to use.

Timo Autiokari

 

[Juan Regoyos]

Can anyone offer me a few words of wisdom on colour balance setting.

My observation on my 3500 are you need to tell the camera when it
is a cloudy day, it guesses other situations OK. Also I was not
over impressed with a manual option, does the kind of white paper
and how angle it make any difference?

Graham:

If you have Photoshop, try the next:

1-Change the profil( Image-Mode-Profil to Profil): From NTSC(1953) To sRGB (with black point compensation).

2-Adjust the color balance(Image-Adjust-Color Balance) in the midtones as this: Red -9 ; Green 0 ; Blue -9.

I have a VQ3000 and finally I do it for all the pictures (tunning some times the final effect over the original image by "copy and paste" over the "history brush source" setted at the beginning).

If you are interested to know why it works, see the Nikon D1 review on this site, just where the color balance is questioned. In the QV3000-3500 the explanation must be similar.

 

[crowning41680]

Can anyone offer me a few words of wisdom on colour balance setting.

I don't use the 'automatic' setting because sometimes it switches color balance between (!) two shots.

90% of all shooting can be done with 'daylight' whitebalance (yes, even indoors with a flash). The rest (or if you need REALLY accurate color) simply make manual white balance using normal xerox paper.
tc