White Balance...what do you do?   I will tell in a few lines what I do to get a decent white balance on photos.  What do you do?  I know this will depend on the camera you have and the capabilities there to do manual white balance or to choose a programmed setting like sun, shade, cloudy, etc.  Do you use a gray or white card for preset white balance?

To my surprise the other evening, the best medium gray came from a bunch of green leaves and not a nicely already gray colored tree trunk.  Humm. to read the tonality of a color view is not easy.  Frankly, I don't preset white balance very often for outdoor shots and use a program settng like sun, cloudy, etc.  Trying to preset in the field can be time consuming and awkard, changing quickly with the light.  I do use a spot reading to set exposure but that is another area altogether.

When not sure at all and depending a bit on software to adjust, with the D70  I go for the programmed settings and not auto.   With the recently acquired D200 I use auto and it works fine.

If wanting to really get on tune, I use a gray card or white card. Do you prefer gray or white for white balance?  Naturally, when manual I use gray for exposure but not always for white balance.  In oddly lit interior shots, the white seems to give the best white balance for my kind of shooting habits.

For raw, I use auto as the only option since it works the best for me, is fast and close enough for correction as needed later.  I shoot a lot of raw.

Any thoughts you have will be appreciated, no matter what your level of photographic experience.

Thanks,     TomDart.

i shoot in raw and correct  white balance (if necessary) later... usually i shot in "auto"...
except for the infrared shoot that i use custom white balance

I do as Mayda ...
I have played with white balance, but find auto on the D200 just fine. Shooting in RAW I can adjust after.

yes, mi too, I agree with Douglas....

Y have this option in my D50 and i can to put my camera in mode A (automatic) : the user chooses the opening and the speed of clogging to obtain the best results. I use very much to be able to take captures from the moon or for take my models in someone element like the water or ..... Without this option I will have too much white in for example the moon.

i hope to help you

hugs

Welllllllllllllll it depends .......................

It depends on what type of photography I am doing.

Just recently I have been shooting mainly butterflies and flowers with a macro lens.  One of the biggest problems of shooting reference type shots of butterflies, besides finding them, for me has been colour.  Once you find your specimen there is no chance of using grey or white cards and flapping about trying to perfect the colour temperature, you have to be ready and get on with the shot before the thing flies off making rude gestures at you!  You have enough to think about getting the exposure, framing and background right and hoping the butterfly or camera doesn't move 'cos all you get then is an impressionist representation of fuzzy colours.

I was shooting in Auto WB Jpegs and that wasn't turning out too well. So I switched to RAW simply for the convenience of altering WB in processing. This is better, but still not good, it leaves me with deciding what the colour was, if I can remember, I might get it somewhere near.  For top quality shots it leaves me little alternative but to shoot a white card at the beginning and hope the light doesn't change too much while I am out. This then leaves me with smaller corrections to do to my RAW file and a better chance of being more accurate.  With this type of shot, in my experience with this camera, Auto WB is not very effective. I am not surprised by that because I am filling the frame with something that is often brightly coloured varying between cool blues and hot reds and oranges with just a smaller outer part of the image which can also vary a lot. Sometimes the background is green foliage, sometimes brown etc etc etc or there could be a flower thrown in there too just to add to the confusion. So there it is for my best shots of this type, a white card.

However that doesn't mean that I am always taking my best shots. If I am going out for a walk around the local nature reserve I take the camera and put it on auto WB and make the best of what I can when I get back.

The same goes for most of my photography, I make a judgement of what is important to me in this type of shot. If I am making a reference shot then colour could be very important and I would spend a lot of time making sure it was spot on.   

Most of my shots are not reference shots though. They are my interpretation of how I want it to be. I am making a pretty picture to hang on the wall, or an image with something to say in which case accurate true colour representation is often way way down on the list of priorities. I'll shoot in auto WB then because I know that I will be processing the image to make it look how I want it to look. An example: I recently posted an image of a wild carrot flower, I think in US you call them Queen Anne's Lace.  That image was never intended to be a reference shot, it was taken to make a large picture that will be framed and hung. The flowers have a tinge of pink in them, but I decided that for my image I wanted it to have much more than a tinge of pink, I used selective colour control in PS to make the image what I wanted it to be.  No point in shooting accurate colour there.  If I were to shoot a landscape shot, I wouldn't worry about white balance I would shoot on auto. I would be going to make the image what I want it to be anyway.  My most viewed image has a parchment coloured sky, I don't ever recollect seeing one in real life !

In conclusion it depends ...........

For reference shots or if someone was paying me to get the colours right (eg advertising) I will use custom white balance.

For general photography I'll use Auto WB, unless it is obvious there will be a problem caused by the type of composition the shot is.

For portraits and people I'll use Auto WB, modern cameras seem very good at getting these right and I may add a bit in PS if I think it looks better that way.

For art work I'll use anything - Auto to deliberately choosing the wrong WB to get the shot I want.

Thanks, Onslow.  In a nutshell, much comes down to hands on experience and gut feelings in a hurried shot and precise balance in a set-up needing it.   I agree, auto on raw helps a lot but still is sometimes off.  The problem I have is reference objects of a color I actually "know" is right, as you mentioned about the clutter of color in a butterfly shot, shot essentially on the fly.

For images at work, techinical sorts of things, I did a lot of work on wb for reference photos but learned the printed ones were always in grayscale!  That changed the procedure to one much more simple for printed images at work.              Tom.

As for my wife, she just drops her choice of film in her camera....

Why this thread? I doubt it will change the way I shoot images.  For those who need encouragement and want to do better, threads like this do have special worth.  So far, the posters ( not counting me)  all are photographers with excellent gallery images.  That is credibility.

I hope some who want to know more will stop by and read the posts.  I have learned a lot here at 'rosity and will learn more.  My photography is better for that.   So, I suppose this is the deeper reason for this thread.     Thanks to all for what has been said thusfar.         Tom.

I'm with Richard...