The importance of white balance revisited

A little post for all you photographers out there. This is a revisit of an older post that gets a fair amount of hits every month. In the previous post I showed how the white balance setting in your raw converter, whether it is your camera or in software, has an enormous influence on the look and feel of an image. Also, there are many situations that simply confuse your camera's automatic white balance algorithms and so you often cannot trust it. This is especially true in landscape photography done at the edges of the day or in situations where there are deeply saturated colors present. A few days ago, I was photographing the sunset at a lake near my house and my D600, although far better at interpreting white balance correctly than any other camera I have shot with clearly got it wrong as should be evident from the image below.

Click for bigger!
This was shot with a 3-stop graduated ND darkening up the sky. The left image shows what the camera thought of the color balance. It rendered the water weirdly green. The white balance it chose is actually pretty close to a tungsten white balance but with a large green value. It is pretty close to the out-of-camera jpeg as I chose landscape picture style and chose the same profile in Lightroom. second from left is the result of clicking on auto in Lightroom. This gives an interesting result with very blue water. I did not use a Blue/Yellow polarizing filter for this image so this does not correspond to what I saw, but is still an interesting image. Again, the automatic system thinks the white balance is close to that of a tungsten bulb. The right three images are daylight, cloudy, and shade in that order. Those all correspond to the mood of the scene much better and choosing between them comes down to taste I think. In fact I would choose close to "Cloudy" if I were pressed.
I haven't posted this and other images from this sunset yet except for the panorama I posted a few days ago where I actually went for the bluish look that the camera itself selected but will do so soon.

The importance of the right white balance

I talked about images from this place before. This is from a little stream in Zion National Park. It is an extreme example of how important it is to know the right white balance. Below I show a single shot from this place using the as-shot white balance, auto Lightroom white balance, daylight, cloudy and shade, and lastly the white balance taken from the neutral patch on a x-rite colorchecker passport. These images, apart from the camera landscape profile are using completely default processing values.



I made this hextich using the print panel in Lightroom and added the text in Photoshop. Click for bigger. As you can see, both the camera and the auto white balance get this completely wrong. The as-shot and auto are far from reality. The rocks on the top left should be orange as they are standard Zion sandstone. The water should not be Cobalt blue. I should also point out here that this image was made at the bottom of a steep canyon where one cayon wall was lit by the sun, causing a very strong glow light in the area where we were. The water is reflecting the light from this canyonwall. Assuming different white balances gets very different results. You can see the results from assuming daylight to shade. Each is giving very different, but much more pleasant results than "as shot" or "auto". The last panel shows what happens when using the neutral patch on my white balance card on the x-rite passport. It is even warmer than "shade"! Of these, I think I prefer shade as the colors are more interesting. One example in which using a white balance card actually is not that helpful. I came accross many more situations like this in the Narrows and other places where the light was just very strange and where my eyes were not seeing what the white balance standard thinks I should be seeing.

EDIT: I posted another illustrative example in a recent blog post.

See more images from Zion in the link.

What a difference a day makes

Two days ago, I was with my wife and kid at a lake where we hiked a little and I took some photographs. It was in the middle of a snowstorm and I needed extreme white balance values to get correct color. So yesterday, as I saw that the sky was clear and the sunset would give nice color I went there again to make photos at more or less the same time. The differences are astounding. Where two days ago this very distinctive tree looked like this:

Yesterday it looked like this:

Quite different indeed.

Another example (bigger version in the link):

Whereas yesterday:

This just illustrates how important it is to be somewhere on the right time to catch the light and the feeling of a place. You can see more images from this place in the flickr set here.

Extreme white balance

I encountered a situation yesterday evening where I was photographing in a snowstorm at dusk. I did not realize this at the time, but the light was so filtered that the camera registered basically purely blue, while our eyes saw everything as just grey even with some orange tinting. This is what the camera thought a scene should look like:



Completely blue indeed. It thought the white balance was basically similar to daylight. If you do "auto white balance" in Lightroom, this is what it looks like:



Lightroom chose 2850K, which is completely wrong. You would think that with all these clouds perhaps shade is correct:



Much better indeed but still way too blue. To get neutral color, I had to dial the white balance to 11:



Basically at the limit of what Lightroom allows, and this is the result.



Very close to what it looked like. It turns out that you can encounter natural conditions where you have to max out Lightroom's slider to get correct color. I even had some photos shot there that maxed out the slider!

For some more photos of this place, see my flickr set on this place.

Why I like shooting RAW

Some people like shooting jpeg, some like RAW. I like RAW because of the added versatility afterwards while the current tools do not actually make it a giant waste of time. Aperture, even though it has terrible RAW development, for example make sit really quick to work with RAW. Likewise the new Adobe Lightroom (looking forward to running the release version) does a similar thing. Here is an example of a RAW file that I originally developed a while ago:



Here is the original development:


The difference is just white balance! and the new development with the bright yellows on the clouds is much closer to what I saw.