Colour cast and white balance

The exercise involved shooting three different scenes:

• Sunlight
• Cloudy
• Open shade on a sunny day

using different white balance settings to determine how well the camera performs under the auto setting.

Sunlight

In the case of the image taken in sunlight at Hastings, it's clear that the auto setting has performed well.  The sunlight adjustment is also very close to this.  The cloudy setting has a green hue, which would only be useful for creating a retro 70's look, and the shade setting is just dreadful!

Auto

Cloudy

Shade

Sunlight

 Cloudy

My cloudy seen was shot in Buttermere in the Lake District.  In this sequence, the auto setting worked very well, the cloudy setting produced a little more green and improved the picture, the shade setting is awful - murky, and the sunlight produced too much blue.

Auto

Cloudy

Shade

Sunlight

Shade

For a picture taken in the shade, the auto setting was disappointing - the colours are very cool, and although this may be real, the tones are not particularly pleasing - they are amost muddy looking.  However, the cloudy setting makes the green and brown warmer and altogether more attractive, whereas the shade setting makes these colours too warm.  The sunlight setting is fairly close to the Auto setting, indicating that the camera was reading from the lighter patches, although still fairly dull in comparison to the cloudy white balance, it is an improvement on the Auto setting.

Auto

Cloudy

Shade

Sunlight

I usually shoot on Auto white balance, and then don't adjust it later in processing, however, this exercise has shown that it is worth checking this, as particularly in the cloudy and the shade images, the photograph was better set to Cloudy.

The second part of the exercise involved shooting an indoors/outdoors scene at dusk, while the exterior is bluish.  This exercise was actually one of the exercises I already completed for TAOP.  To avoid self-plagiarism, please refer to: the previous exercise from my TAOP blog

In addition, I tried playing with the white balance slider in the raw file and found that a setting called "high colour rendering fluorescent" was perhaps the best:

High Colour Rendering Fluorescent