Whitebalance Settings- Preset?

Just curious who here uses Auto whitebalance and who uses the other settings. Other applicable whitebalance settings on the coolpix include "Speedlite" and "Preset."

To use the Whitebalance Preset, you hold a white card (or the back of my slate...heh) in front of the camera and press the preset button. Then the camera calibrates the whitebalance - taking about 2 seconds. Do you need to use a "special" 14% gray card or anything like that?

Can I expect to get beter contrast shooting w/ white sand in the frame? I really noticed problems this weekend while shooting some test shots in the swimming pool.

Cheers

James Wiseman

I use auto white balance, though I have the C-4040. My feeling is that the manual white balance function is too much of a pain underwater because there are so many factors involved. The only exception I might make is if I was not using any flash at all, then I might try it. The strobe should be giving you some approximation of daylight -- what, exactly, are the problems you are seeing? The main problem I've had with white backgrounds is that sometimes that affects the metering and exposure.

Mike

Well, I would exactly call it a problem, but it can be very difficult capturing subjects which are against a white sand background.

There are a couple of ways to work this:

1) Change your exposure

2) Adjust the camera's white balance settings

3) Use "in-camera" contrast +/- function which is found on the Coolpix 5000.

I know how to work #1, am thinking about #2 and will try #3 on my next divetrip.

Cheers

James

Hmmm, as long as the white sand is coming out white, I don't think changing white balance will help you very much. Not sure about #3. I know #1 will help, especially if you are using a strobe . . .

Mike

I'm not sure that the white balance is your main problem. If you use a housed SLR film camera on TTL you will over expose your foreground subject as the camera will expose your photo based on the overall scene. In this case the white sand will overwhelm the subject you want properly exposed. This is why TTL will not work for wide angle unless you start messing with the EV exposure. TTL does work fine with macro and and close up photos where the subject makes most of the exposure that the camera reads. In my limited understanding of white balance the purpose is to get the right color for the color of light under the circumstances of the photo you are taking. Rather like the way the color temp. of a strobe will determine the color of a subject that you are illuminating with that strobe.

Hi James.

I've been looking into the whole issue of white balance, raw modes, conversion before vs after in photoshop, color profiling, etc.

I've also played with it, to some degree with the G2, whose results you have seen.

I think that shooting in auto, underwater, is probably a mistake. It makes assumptions, (like all this blue stuff must be sky, and should be light blue...), that change with depth, vis, daytime, etc.

The goal is to get a work-flow that is at least close to automated - so you can batch process entire directories through some or all of the steps.

To me, it seems that a shifting white balance, due to auto, is not going to help this.

In fact, with the G2, shooting raw, I can and do adjust the WB after the fact, when converting raw to tif. The tools let me see what it would do in auto, sunny daylight, cloudy, tungsten, flash, etc. And it lets me do manual, by selecting a location in an image, and telling it that spot should be neutral - gray to white.

When it converts, the image is often startling. I mean, all the blue cast goes away, and it looks like some strange seen with no water.

This is the same thing you would get, (I think), by doing manual - to much over correction, I think. But it is certainly worth throughing into your bag of tricks.

I found I had to increase contrast in photo shop, much of the time. Try an auto-level, (which either works or ruins it - in which case just undo), and then try auto-contrast, which does less, but seems to be safe.

Want to share an image from the pool, to give us an idea of what you mean. What are you doing for strobe? What distance, f-stop, and focal length in your pool?

Oh - another thing - if the cp5k has auto ISO, you probably want to turn that off, so that it doesn't change all expectation on you..

There have been a lot of great discussions in the dpreview forums.

Good luck.