DPP: Exercise 10: White Balance

The purpose of this exercise is to examine the effects of the camera's white balance settings under several lighting conditions.  The first set was shot in ares pictured above, the afternoon sun off to the right, the camera pointed at the area in direct sunlight in the red circle.  The arrow points to a shaded spot just out of frame where a second series was taken.

Unlike the human eye, which makes its own adjustments to different lighting conditions, digital cameras may record scenes with particular color casts depending on the available lighting and the camera's settings.  Scenes may sometimes appear bluish, or green, or orange.

While all digital cameras come with an Auto-WB feature, it is also possible to set the WB manually using a number of common presets, three of which can be seen in the collage below.

Auto and Sunny seem quite close here and are slightly cool.  When skies are cloudy, the light becomes a bit cooler, or bluer, so switching to Cloudy WB adds some warmth, or red, as can be seen here.  Light in shade is cooler still, so choosing Shady WB adds even more warmth.

While doing this exercise I learned about the LR White Balance Selector (the dropper) and tried it out on the a copy of the Auto WB image above. I used the bit of gray on the train car (circled) as neutral reference and the result is very close to Auto WB.

In picture at the top of this post an arrow appears pointing off camera.  This is where a second set of identical images was shot, but this time with the train in shadow.

The same principles apply and ideally the Shady preset should present a better color balance, but to me it appears overly warm.  The Auto present appears a bit too cool, but using the White Balance Selector resulted in what appears to result in a better color balance.  The area in red circle, just below the red signage, was used as the neutral reference.

The exercise brief calls for a similar set shot under cloudy conditions, but the skies in Dubai have been rather sunny lately.  If only I had been working on this a couple of weeks ago.

One last required set mimics an exercise from TAOP, an image shot under two different lighting conditions, the sun outside and light bulbs inside.  The brief asks for images under three WB settings, but I've added two, including use of flash.  Images were taken at approximately 07:10, with sunrise at approximately 06:50.

Auto and Sunny WB are fairly similar, with an overly orange cast, while fluorescent is noticeably violet. Of the non-flash settings, incandescent comes closet to what appears the real winner, the image shot with flash using speed light WB.

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