White Balance Setting ??

Hi - I've a Canon G5 which I have housed.

I'm curious as to what folks recommend for white balance?

Currently I'm using the sun setting for shallow brightly lit water and the cloudy setting for water below 10 meters. When I use my striobe I use the flash setting.

Is that what most people use?

I heard the other say that it may be better to use auto white balance - thoughts anyone? Thanks.......Iain

I always shoot my G2 in RAW mode, so I can adjust the white balance, as necessary, while looking at it. Breeze browser makes this easy.

But your ideas are right, for doing different settings at different depths, and lighting conditions are good. Of course, you can also do manual white balance, underwater, but I find it makes the blue disappear too much.

Don

Hi Don, thanks for your reply - appreciate your time.

I use Breezebrowser often and did not know it had a RAW function. I've just been fooling with it and WOW - it is fantastic! The images look so much better when shot in RAW then converted to JPEGS - thanks for the tip here to use B/B.

Question: When you select your white balance using breezebrowser, which WB setting to do select for U/W images? I note that many of settings make your image look pretty good. How do you find the auto setting? Also, do you ever use the custom white balance? Likewise, the results are impressive but it seems subjective as to what shade of gray you select from the image.

Guess I'm converted to RAW! Thanks again Don...............Iain

Hi Iain.

When I shoot in RAW, the camera still puts in the "settings", that you had, when the shot was taken. So I usually shoot RAW, AutoWB.

Then in BB, for a first cut, you can convert everything "as shot", which will be auto WB.

For those images that this does not work well, I bring up the view, and pick a spot in the image, that I want to be neutral white/gray. You can click a few different spots, and see what the preview looks like.

I've also heard of folks shooting a slate, at various depths, and keeping the images. Then in BB, you can set a WB, from one of those images, and tell it to convert other images, with that WB.

Don

Hey Don: Another good idea with regard to the slate - at least it will provide a good benchmark to determine the best gray / white scale to use. Although I think you could get confused as to when you shot what....

Thanks for your help here - I'm off to PNG in a few days time so hope to get some good results using your advice and comments......Iain