White Balance

[airconvent]

Hi Gurus,
Hope you all can share some tips on using white balance.
At auto mode, when taking photos indoors with light bulbs, the photos generally come out in warm orangy colours. Setting the WB to "tungsten" yields better correction but still has an orange tinge.
How do people get those great shots without this orange tinge?
Do share your experience here...
Thanks

[aaron80]

Preset WB? I know some will use grey card or expodisc to preset their white balance.. The results will not be so orangy and warm..

[tiong78]

use RAW..

[airconvent]

Originally Posted by tiong78 use RAW..

Hi
Can you pls elaborate? Raw merely means the shot's full details are retained but should not link to the wb?
thanks

[timo]

Originally Posted by airconvent Hi Can you pls elaborate? Raw merely means the shot's full details are retained but should not link to the wb? thanks

A raw image (i.e. the digital data in the file) is not affected by the WB setting on the camera, or by the sharpening, contrast or saturation settings, except that the settings are (I think) recorded in the exif data tagged to the file. Your raw converter may read the WB setting in the info tagged onto the raw file and use that in the way it initially presents the picture. This is what happens with Adobe camera raw for example, when it presents the picture as 'as shot'. But you can then change the WB with the slider to whatever you like, at which point the converter changes its description of your setting to 'custom'. Only after that do you click OK and the raw file is converted to a tiff or jpg or whatever. It's true that AWB on the camera, left to itself, presents tungsten light a bit on the orange side; but in your raw converter window this is easily adjusted without destroying data in the picture. It's much less destructive than taking a jpg which has already been compressed, and then trying to change the WB, which gives less good results.

Hope this helps.

tim

[airconvent]

Thanks Tim!
But I guess if I took all my shots in rarw format, I would have to by a 4GB 12-pack heh heh