I have recently started using a digital camera, a Canon D60, and am not pleased about the white balance. When a camera samples the scene for the white balance, does it use information uniformly from the entire field, or if there is a spotmeter does it base the white balance on that part of the meter reading?
Cameras need a white reference for that measurement, they don't get it from the meter. On your camera (which I think works pretty much like my 10D) you can take a picture of a white card (white reference); the camera would use that frame to set its WB in AUTO mode (AWB). You can also safely guesstimate the K value with a little practice for cases in which a white card is not available or no other white objects are at hand. White Balance measures the light K value which illuminates a scene it doesn't measure the objects in an image. Further, in some cases you may have mixed lighting which makes matters slightly more complex. For example: if you are shooting under tungsten ambient light and want to use flash as a main or fill light you'll have to use a gel on the flash to match the ambient light and set the camera to that K value. This will give uniform light cast (color). However, for creative purposes, it's desirable occasionally to let one of the two light sources "shift". In the example just given, if you set the camera to a K value of 5600-5800 (around a typical flash K value) and use the flash without gels then, the tungsten ambient light would appear as shifted (redish, the typical tungsten colorcast when used with daylight film/wb) while the flash light would be balanced and not shifted. This difference (shift) would give the picture a different feeling.
Posted on Sep 14, 2005
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