The Power Of RAW

Outdoors Using PreSet White Balance Setting

by John S. Krill, NOCCC Beginner’s Digital Photography SIG

 

Every day I’m reminded why I always shoot in RAW versus JPG. Today is no different. So what happened to the picture? I was using the wrong White Balance setting. Can it be corrected? Yes. Let me explain.

White Balance: Jump over to this short DPReview explanation of White Balance. It should give you an idea of what the digital camera needs to do to get the proper White , or Color, Balance for each image.

How Do We Fix Bad White Balance?

Lightroom 4 Develop Module

One of the big, and I really mean BIG, advantages too exposing all your images in the camera’s native RAW format is basic corrections, such as White Balance, can be easily achieved. In this example I’m using Adobe Lightroon 4.1 but you could also use Adobe Photoshop Elements and open the image using the RAW editor. For correcting White Balance the procedure is the same.

For this image the White Balance in the camera was set to the wrong setting. So the first thing I tried was setting the White Balance to Auto. You never know it just might be that easy. And it was. I didn’t require any other changes.

Lightroom 4 Develop Module White Balance Setting

Notice that in the Adobe RAW editor the White Balance setting will always be set to AS SHOT. When I changed to AUTO the image below was the result.

Lightroom 4 Develop Module Image White Balance Set To ‘Auto’

I then cropped the image and Uploaded it to the NOCCC Blog. It was that easy. And that’s why I will always shoot in RAW.

Chapman University On A Quite Sunday

Using The White Balance Selector To Acquire, Or Fine Tune, The Color Balance.

If you’re taking photos indoors you may have a combination of artificial light sources. You then can use the method described in the video to get the proper color balance.

The video is produced by the photographer Ibarionex Perello, who wrote the book Chasing the Light: Improving Your Photography Using Available Light, which I review here. He is also a terrific teacher.

How to Adjust White Balance.

Here’s is another video about fine tuning the White Balance of Color Balance of your pictures. Just click me right now.

 

In the future we will explain how you a can create a custom White Balance setting in your camera.