I would like to know how you do it,'cause sometimes I get very good results,sometimes not. I'm not interested about the grey card method (since I don't have one ).

just go by your eyes to get neutral. by the way, white balance doesn't mean anything any more in digital days. you would think today's best commercial shooters and retouching houses should use correct white balance. b

There is often no correct wb for a scene that has multiple light sources (common)

You should use wb with a combination of split toning and hsl tweaks to get perfect color.

The wb brush in lr4 helps too.

If you use a canon sensor with default adobe profiles, try dropping the orange saturation by 15 and increasing the orange luminance by 15. That should help you by evening out the color response.

morganb4 wrote:
You should use wb with a combination of split toning and hsl tweaks to get perfect color.


Why split toning ? It's something I have not tried but I didn't see it as a WB tool.

- Alan

It's not but to achieve overall good color balance, it's indispensable as you can tweak highlight and shadow color shifts with it.

mshi wrote:
just go by your eyes to get neutral. by the way, white balance doesn't mean anything any more in digital days. you would think today's best commercial shooters and retouching houses should use correct white balance. b

ethompson53 wrote:

I sure they go the colors they wanted.

which basically means WB doesn't much now.

Well if correct WB matters to you, a grey card shot in the first frame can be sampled in post and that balance applied to the remaining shots, it is that simple. There are many brands of grey cards, do some research as to which bias you like, not all grey cards are the same or neutral. You can also set WB in camera by using a custom WB shot off the grey card so all of the I ages are 'balanced' in camera.

As far as the examples shown by other posters, we don't really know whether these effects were done in post or in camera but if you get the file balanced in camera then you can apply consistent post effects from assignment to assignment if that is the look you like. If the shots aren't balanced then trying to get the same look is very tricky if not impossible due to channel differences.

If you haven't used a gray card (and even a gray card won't always give you what looks neutral visually, depending on how the scene it lighted), once you get the image into Camera Raw you can use the white balance eyedropper in Camera Raw to peck around in areas that look neutral to try to achieve a color balance that satisfies your eye. Your color balance will be relative to the point you choose, whether or not the point is actually neutral by the numbers. If you need to determine exact color numbers, you can use the color sampler tool in Camera Raw, or the INFO palette in Photoshop.

Alan321 wrote:
morganb4 wrote:
You should use wb with a combination of split toning and hsl tweaks to get perfect color.


Why split toning ? It's something I have not tried but I didn't see it as a WB tool.

- Alan



Hmmm, that's interesting ... I may give split toning a stab @ WB issues.

While some people will "click" adjust WB from a single neutral point (i.e. gray card, etc.), I typically use color balance in PS so that I can target my highlight adjustments differently from my shadow adjustments (reading the numbers). Shooting outdoors often has "mixed lighting" issues as our shadows typically have more blue/cyan than our sunlit portions of the scene. Prior to now, I haven't considered LR as being capable of handling the diff portions of the scene as PS can with shadow/midtone/highlight.

I can see possibilities for using split tone @ lows & highs, following WB brush at neutral mids as a workflow for WB correction. I'm still largely a PS user vs. LR ... but it might breathe some additional refinement capability @ LR that I had not previously considered.

Will have to see how that goes someday.

Just remember, at the end of the day, "accurate" white balance is a bit of a misnomer.

morganb4 wrote:There is often no correct wb for a scene that has multiple light sources (common)


Human vision is HEAVILY affected by all sorts of cognitive processing that goes on after the retinal image is created. Cameras just grab a retinal image and are done with it. Human perception of color and its photographic rendition are always and invariably going to be different experiences.

You can use a grey card, but that will work best if it is the size of the entire scene, so that it captures the range of lighting temperatures.

Honestly, the best thing will usually be a) shooting (always in raw) somewhere in the ballpark originally, and then

mshi wrote:
just go by your eyes to get neutral


in LR, using some of the techniques mentioned above.

I agree with what has been said already.

White Balance is just a matter of colors with digital. It used to be important when you didn't have the freedom to change colors after the click, nowadays you can pretty much change everything with a single curve control, so it's just about your preferences in how the image should look.

It still has applications, though, if used with a proper reference, a macbeth checker or a proper grey card, and speeds up the work a lot in controlled lighting environment.
If you don't have a controlled environment probably white balance doesn't need to be accurate (in the sense that the colors you'll see on your screen should match the ones your eyes were looking at when shooting), and you can pretty much do all the color corrections you want or need.

Even a skin-tone can be quite arbitrary (in a certain range), sometimes a grey card helps to set a tone color standard to which everybody must agree without too much discussing

In the movie industry, for example, the White Balance is totally ignored these days, because everybody shoots RAW so everything can be changed later, but a macbeth chart is always shot as reference, since all the cuts needs to be consistent and the only way is to refer to the proper color chart.

G.