White balance guide

  • Candlelight: 1900
  • Incandescent light: 2700
  • Sunrise/golden hour: 2800 to 3000
  • Halogen lamps: 3000
  • Moonlight: 4100
  • White LEDs: 4500
  • Mid-day: 5000 to 5500
  • Flash: 5500
  • Overcast/cloudy: 6500 to 7500
  • Shade: 8000
  • Heavy cloud cover: 9000 to 10000
  • Blue sky: 10000

handy to set your camera up more accurately for different light conditions

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Auto WB works for me.

Sometimes artificial light can make things yellow or blue, but that can be fixed in post edits. Even jpegs can be fixed.

In the clouds with google photos you can make a cold pic warm & vice versa …with a single click.

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Me too, I use auto wb, and use Pixlr (is Google photos good for editing?) I wonder if RS was thinking about his upcoming cruise? I don’t know if he would be able to access wifi and google while striding around the sunny climes of…:thinking: Norway? heavens I can’t remember where he’s going now. But yes maybe doing it on the camera is more efficient for him at the time :woman_shrugging:

If you are getting yellow or blue colour Dood then your camera is on the wrong Kelvin number. this is why I put this up to try and help. Auto WB doesn’t always get it right

I always use a colour calibration chart to set accurate colours in nearly all conditions.

I use a number of different tools including Gimp and PaintDotNet for levelling, cropping, cloning, layering, general tweaking … I then upload to Google Photos where I keep as a back-up. I can organise into albums, link to sites like this etc. But yes there are some idiot proof tools: the main one, when you click on Edit you see 20 different versions of your pic some emphasising Highlights/Shadows/Colour/WB etc. You might think your pic is perfect before you uploaded it, but click on some of these to see interesting alternative versions.

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Oh thanks! I’ll try it out then…I didn’t know it had all those gizmos, I just assumed it was a storage site :+1:

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Graham this is about light not colours, colour calibration again depends on ambient light and it a devil of a job to get it right even using Color Munkie i know I tried. But that is another subject completely

Yes, but my chart sets the white balance based on ambient light. It also has a number of whites from slightly blue to slightly red to make the picture warmer or cooler, based of preference. But it has a
pure white for basic setup and a grey for exposure calibration. The colour calibration allows restoration of colours if the ambient light is off-white, although sometimes that doesn’t always work and can make the picture look a bit off. When desperate and I’ve forgotten my kit, I sometimes ask my wife to hold up a piece of paper or a hankie for one exposure, just to get the WB as close as possible, which I set in post process.

Google Drive is just storage, Google Photos is more.

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why not get one of these which give pure white- pure black and 18% grey

The only one you really need to know is daylight. So you can capture the true colours of a sunset for example otherwise the AWB washes it out but even then most modern cameras have a “sunset” setting which captures the best sunsets/rises.