How do you generally do color / white balance calibration while shooting?

[QuixoticOne]

Do most of you who shoot RAW (or who just want to further correct colors in digital photos) shoot a neutral target and/or color chart at the start of a set of shots with a given exposure?

Do you often just eyeball correct it later on even without any specific calibration reference taken at the time of shooting?

Do you just shoot in JPEG mode and let the camera figure it out for you?

What about cases where you're using a telephoto, shooting landscapes, wildlife, in confined spaces, et. al. where it isn't always easy to get a color target or neutral reference card out in the depth of field of the lens you're using without undue delay or gymnastics / precarious positioning?

Do you most often just use a small grey card, or often use a more elaborate color checker chart even for outdoor / "non staged" types of shots?

 

[Deadtrees]

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...090070&highlight_key=y

 

[ivan2]

as long as you have ANYTHING that is grey or white in the picture, you can use the white balance color picker thingy to correct it in raw post processing.

For jpeg I use eye ball in photoshop but I suspect the adobe camera raw can process JPEG as well, can someone correct me on this one?

 

[GrJohnso]

No single setting... when shooting sports out in daylight, I just set it to daylight WB, and shoot jpeg only... I haven't shot much sports indoors yet, so haven't fine tuned a process there... Yet...

For regular indoors with consistent lighting, I'll set the WB to one of the presets (tungst. flr, etc) and use raw+jpeg... For most other shots, AWB shooting raw+jpeg then review and correct in lightroom if needed, hoping for the best...

 

[sygyzy]

Post-processing RAW is extremely boring and time consuming. I shot like a 100 pictures of fireworks in RAW thinking I would want to tweak them here and there after. Do you realize how slow it is to go through 100 pictures of fireworks? Besides being boring, it's also physically slow since each file is so large. I have a dual core with 4 GB's of RAM and Lightroom is extremely sluggish with RAW. In fact, it's just slow, to the point of crashing or freezing, in general. It sucks.

Lastly, when you are dealing with fireworks and tweak WB, you can have blue streaks turn green, red, or orange, and vice versa. The thing is, nobody was there at the event with you so there's no right answer. Heck, I don't even remember if 1:04 minutes into it, if it was a red or green flare.

This is just a specific example, but I cannot imagine post processing more than 5 pictures of ANY event.

JPEG + Picasa + "I'm feeling lucky" for me!

 

[soydios]

Originally posted by: sygyzy
Post-processing RAW is extremely boring and time consuming. I shot like a 100 pictures of fireworks in RAW thinking I would want to tweak them here and there after. Do you realize how slow it is to go through 100 pictures of fireworks? Besides being boring, it's also physically slow since each file is so large. I have a dual core with 4 GB's of RAM and Lightroom is extremely sluggish with RAW. In fact, it's just slow, to the point of crashing or freezing, in general. It sucks.

Lastly, when you are dealing with fireworks and tweak WB, you can have blue streaks turn green, red, or orange, and vice versa. The thing is, nobody was there at the event with you so there's no right answer. Heck, I don't even remember if 1:04 minutes into it, if it was a red or green flare.

This is just a specific example, but I cannot imagine post processing more than 5 pictures of ANY event.

JPEG + Picasa + "I'm feeling lucky" for me!

You need to take advantage of two of Lightroom's key features:
1) Develop Preset. I use this to apply noise reduction, sharpening, color, and contrast.
2) Copy Develop Setting. This can be used to copy any develop setting from one picture to another. With RAW you can copy White Balance from one picture to as many as you need.

So, in the case of the fireworks, just set a white balance on one frame, then copy/paste it to all the others. Boom, done, and if you want more tweaking on really good ones later then you have the RAW.

 

[ZOXXO]

When shooting outside the realm of snapshots, I use a Whibal card.

Here is the video that convinced me to purchase the Whibal.

 

[dblevitan]

I shoot RAW and generally find the Auto setting on my D70 to be good enough. Photography (especially nature, which is what I primarily do) does not need to be a perfect science. The goal is to get a good looking photograph, not the most accurate color representation. Lightroom is fast enough on RAW for me (especially after it generates previews) and while yes, it does take time to edit photos, I don't need to do that for more than 10% of the photos I take. Of those, auto wb is on target 99% of the time and very rarely do I need to tweak anything. The only times I really play with it is when printing in order to get the exact right look that I want.

 

[virtuamike]

I guess based on lighting.

 

[Triumph]

I just use the color balance function in PS to adjust after the fact. *shrug* The 300D has a horribly tedious process for setting WB.