manual white balance

[luv2liv]

does anyone have this and what's your experience? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00O4CWC4C/
it is a lot for $50. but i like the size and can strap it to my neck.
the gray card just isnt convient and can easily bend.

 

[Syborg1211]

I had one. I used it maybe once. It's a great idea in theory, but you have to redo the white balance every time the light changes or you move to a different scene. The whole custom white balance in camera process is kind of annoying. I just do white balance corrections in post. Not always 100% accurate, but it's fine for my uses.

 

[luv2liv]

i agree, i do raw for photos and correct in post.
but this time, i need something for video. looks like Promaster white balance lens cap does the same thing like Expodisc but for a more reasonable $11 than $50.

 

[shortylickens]

Nope.
I got this a year ago
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B012TI52FS?psc=1

Works great. Small and easy to use. Highly recommended.

 

[Paladin3]

If you can control the lighting and need to make sure each shot is lit and exposed perfectly then tools like that are wonderful. I've never used that particular one, but I used calibration targets like these when I ran a district for one of the big school photo yearbook companies. I would train my photographers to set up four lights according to diagram then use the white side of the target to take a custom white balance. Then flip and shoot the black/grey/white side, adjusting exposure until the histogram had three spikes all within range. We set the cameras up exactly the way we wanted them and shot JPGs, so we never had to process a single image before we sent it to the printer unless someone goofed.

Today I don't even bother. Today's DSLR cameras seem to do pretty well on auto when I'm shooting available light and I can check it in the LCD screen and make fine adjustments. 90% of the time I'm mixing strobe with available light, bouncing it around and/or shooting on the run and taking test shots is quicker. It just depends on the situation and lighting.

What I guess I would really like to have some day is a color meter and a huge book of gel swatches. I'd take an available light temperature reading then gel my flash to match then shoot a custom white balance of it all. This would be great for using flash to fill indoors.

When I did newspaper work and we were shooting film, I would carry a few different green gels for florescent lights and a few amber gels for incandescent. I'd eyeball it and usually it was close enough.

All this talk of shooting raw and then spending hours in post processing makes me tired, but I'm pretty much naturally lazy. My goal is to get every shot right in camera and save myself time and money. It didn't mater too much when I was shooting news since photoshopping half a dozen images isn't too much work. When I shoot Santa photos at the mall or a wedding and I need each one of hundreds to be printable then I do my best to get it right in camera using every trick I know.

 

[Rifter]

I agree with the do it in post responses.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Speaking of white balances ... I just noticed over the weekend that the WB setting on my Canon 5d Mk3 was stuck on whatever the flash unit had set it to. I had snapped a couple of interior shots of the wife with indirect tungsten lighting (incandescent bulbs) and the yellow cast surprised me. Set the WB to AWB and it was corrected, but I had not expected the WB to be synced to the flash unit (sorry, not aware of an ASCII code to represent the 'flash' symbol).

I usually don't worry about WB in camera or at the point of capture since I always shoot RAW and adjust accordingly during import. Still, maybe it is worth my exercise to try to capture more correctly.