Manual Colour Balance

[Nicolas]

How often do you guys use manual colour balance during shooting? Or do you simply adjust it using pp after shooting?

And when you adjust the white balance using the cam, do you place a white or grey paper in front of the cam? Or do you adjust it using your own judgement? Which is better or more accurate?

 

[NoMoney]

How often do you guys use manual colour balance during shooting? Or do you simply adjust it using pp after shooting?

And when you adjust the white balance using the cam, do you place a white or grey paper in front of the cam? Or do you adjust it using your own judgement? Which is better or more accurate?

I use Auto white balance and shoot in Auto for the flexibility of changing the WB later.

 

[fengwei]

If you are not comfortable w/ MWB, shoot in RAW

 

[istDeS]

I use AWB and shoot in Raw most of the time. I have a white balance filter but seldom use it.

 

[creampuff]

AWB is OK for daylight scenes but isn't terribly good when encountering mixed light sources and incandescent lighting. This is true for many other DSLRs. That's when I use the manual settings or do a custom WB.

If you need to adjust white balance in PP, you could shoot at a grey card as a test shot and use the grey point eye dropper in Levels in PS to remove colour casts. Of course if the card has a pure black or white swatch, even better as you can set the shadow and highlight as well.

You could also use an Expodisc, which I sometimes use for indoor shots. Accurate and great if you don't want to PP. One caveat - WB will be accurate so long as the lighting condition remains the same. Once the lighting condition changes, you'll need to get the camera to do another custom WB reading.

If you don't want to use/don't have a grey card or Expodisc (or equivalent), you can use Photoshop's Threshold adjustment layers to determine the darkest and lightest parts of the image and neutral grey too, just that it is a little more tedious.