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Photographers - where would you pick the white balance point?

In the presence of any haze, it makes a big difference to the result whether you pick a nearby spot or a distant spot.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Only 2 of the arrows make sense unless you are looking for a particular exposure eg to overexpose the photo. For normal I would use top middle but if the haze is hampering I would possibly choose top or bottom left. Top right would be between optimal exposure and about one stop over.

France

Hmmm I thought white balance should not be directly dependent on the exposure; a colour is right or it isn’t?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

As it is a sunny day, i think you don’t have to search for a « white point » in the picture.
The sun has one K temperature.
Normally the standard « sunny » setting would be the better.

I would concentrate on framing, exposure and focus.
Leave colour balance for post, because even with cheap kit it’s not going to be that far out.

United Kingdom

Probably the foreground.

But white balance in landscape photography is pretty subjective. Unless your subject is something specialised, such as clothing for a catalogue, I wouldn’t overly stress about it.

To take an extreme example, imagine if your image was taken at a dramatic sunset – you clearly wouldn’t attempt to white balance that out.

Thanks for all the input.

I am doing this in Lightroom; each pic individually. I have a colour-corrected monitor (X-Rite gadget). The camera is set for auto WB. I am currently going through a few hundred pics; some with a S10e, some with Canon G7X, some with Pentax K1. All shot in RAW so AFAIK the auto-WB is bypassed anyway.

I too thought the foreground may be best because in aerial shots like this the distance is nearly always hazy and with a blue tint and getting rid of that (without gradualtion) produces bad things in the foreground.

Yes; a lot of lighting conditions are just too far off to make sense.

Years ago we had a thread here about graduated haze removal, and I acquired some Lightroom presets but seem to have lost them.

Re the sun always being the same colour temp: sure it is in the vacuum of space, but the light changes when it passes through the air. That’s why light under a blue sky is blue; if you take a pic of a sheet of paper it will actually be blue, even though your brain tells you it is white because it knows paper is white

Surprisingly, stills taken from a Sony X3000 action cam, 1920×1080, look completely natural without doing anything:


That camera must be doing AWB.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
7 Posts
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