Two images taken inside Great Wilbraham Barn with automatic white balance
Images below are similar views also taken with AWB and then the white balance corrected in Lightroom
The last image is taken with custom white balance by photographing a white card and setting the camera's custom white balance before shooting the scene. Colour rendition looks better but would need further trials. Anyone got comments on theoretical value of the two approaches?
2 comments:
Hi Ann
As long as you shoot RAW it does not matter whether the camera or Lightroom applies the white balance. The outcome is 100% the same.
The in-camera white balance only pre-sets the white balance of the RAW files.
However, in practise it can make a difference: shooting a grey card guarantees you correct colour, whereas in post production you need some genuine white/grey in the picture to get the same result. Otherwise you are left with setting the white balance by your judgement.
Just my £0.02: I don't fancy fully corrected white balance for interiors - it is correct, but looks artificial. Tungsten light gives this kind of warm feeling to a scene, so I often end up correcting it to a point where I feel it looks natural.
All the best,
Markus
Markus is right, in that the WB setting only affects the embedded JPEGs and metadata when shooting RAW. If shooting JPEGs only, it's much more important to get it right "in camera"!
It would be interesting to compare the following:
(1) take a camera reading off white paper or a grey card; and
(2) include the same paper/card in one of the shots, and use it to sample the white balance in Lightroom.
In principle the results should be the same, but it will depend on the specific lighting falling on the reference material.
The other factor here, I suspect, is that the barn is made of wood: as a result it will tend to reflect warm colours, in addition to the effect of the tungsten lighting. As a result, I would expect sampling off the table cloth (for example) to result in something which looks artificially cold.
I'm with Markus on this one: use the sampler to get into the right ballpark, and then warm the image back up until it seems natural.
That's my 2p worth, so you now have 4p in total!!
Ian.
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