Unlike Dry Land, Perfect Auto White Balance is a myth!!!

Ok if you not a fan of bad Water movies you probably don’t get the whole title. 😛  ON the plus side I figured as much so todays little topic is Auto White Balance, its on most camera’s and most of us use it…  Yet is it really doing all it should? is it smarter than doing a traditional white balance reading? Well lets see shall we?

Below is our reference photograph, it was taken with tungsten lighting, two 90 watt lightbulbs at 45 degree angles to each other, the camera is set on a locked tripod, the exposure is the same for all photographs, this shot was RAW, and the white balance was determined using the WhiBal card on the scarf, please pay close attention to what happens when we start to use the other white balance options…  Please note that the first photograph is the only one that used software for color balance, the rest is all in camera settings.

As you can see the above photographs are close, but there are differences which may or may not hinder an image, alot of how close you need to be is in what you plan on doing with the shots.  If you are anal close doesn’t cut it, if you are just doing some things for fun and yourself, close works.

Now lets see what happens when we let the camera do all the work for us…

Hmmm, seems like the camera may not be making the best choices for us in a “normal” indoor lighting situation, now if you added in mixed lighting….

Now of course outdoors AWB is different, and one day soon I will post on that as well, hopefully this will get you thinking a bit more about how and what your camera can do, and how it can be improved…