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.
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.
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.
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.
Hmmm I thought white balance should not be directly dependent on the exposure; a colour is right or it isn’t?
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.
In the presence of any haze, it makes a big difference to the result whether you pick a nearby spot or a distant spot.