My advice for correcting white balance in your photographs is to use a WhiBal Pocket reference card when taking your pictures. These are inexpensive, small and easy to use. It's not the only way to do it, but it works for me. I have found that the automatic white balance setting on my camera is only correct some of the time, usually OK outdoors in sunlight, but rarely correct indoors with incandescent or fluorescent lights and rarely correct in mixed lighting.

Here is a photograph taken this morning (and it's not easy to get a daughter to accept to be photographed at the breakfast table) using the automatic white balance setting on a Nikon D700. The lens was a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4. Good camera, so it should be OK, right?




I'm sure we have all taken lots of photos that look like this. What is unusual is that it seems our brains can accommodate for incorrect colors and we don't necessarily see it as "wrong". If you stare at the above photo for awhile and then scroll quickly to the photo below, the photo below looks too "cool", even though it is technically correctly balanced. However, if you stare at the photo below for awhile and then scroll up to the photo above it will look way off as well.

It was shot as a RAW file, no flash, everything set to let the camera decide exposure, white balance, etc. As you can see there is a WhiBal card next to the model's face, in the same light as the model's face. I open the RAW file in my post-processing software (in this case Capture NX2) and under camera adjustments I choose "Set Gray point" under the white balance adjustments and click the eye-dropper on the WhiBal card and automatically get this:





Gone is the yellow/green cast of the original image. This doesn't mean you have to stop there (some people like a "warmer" temperature for portraits) but at least you can start with something which is accurate for that light. You don't have to have the WhiBal card in every picture you take; just in one photograph and then copy/paste the correction to all of the photos taken in that light with your post-processing software. You can take the picture with the WhiBal card before, during or after you have taken your subject photos.

Watching the manufacturer's videos will give you a better idea of how to use it.

http://www.whibalhost.com/_Tutorials/WhiBal/01/

For those who think that taking a "picture" just like we used to with film is the way to go, this is frequently overlooked. Film had only one color temperature (usually corrected for either "daylight" or "indoor") and the only way to correct for a slide was with CC filters over the lens when shot, or with CC filters on the enlarger if printed from a negative. Digital photography is different.

I just shoot RAW on AWB, and process with CS5. This way I don't have to worry about WB. And if I notice any problem with WB when preparing the RAW image, I correct it with the CS5 sliders.

I shoot only RAW. Make any corrections (if needed) in Adobe Photoshop.

I also only shoot in RAW, but the WhiBal allows me to correct white balance easily and consistently in post-processing. I just don't seem to get WB nailed by just moving sliders when I've been staring at the screen for too long.

quote:

Originally posted by Wink:
I also only shoot in RAW, but the WhiBal allows me to correct white balance easily and consistently in post-processing. I just don't seem to get WB nailed by just moving sliders when I've been staring at the screen for too long.

It works very well with Canon RAW images. PhotoShop and LightRoom can be set to do the work automatically. I haven't set the WB on my cameras for years now. They are always set to Automatic White Balance. If any problem, it's easily corrected before pre-processing (before the RAW image is opened for final processing).