Context: I took some photos with friends. It was evening and we were inside, only one weak light on. Possibly incandescent bulb but I didn’t check. Going by memory it was quite dark (I went up to 6400 ISO…) and the light was very warm.
Now here’s my problem. The camera had set the color temperature at around 2900/3000 K. The photos were IMO too reddish.
So I tried adjusting it with Lightroom’s “eye dropper”, selecting a wall as reference for “white” (Not my house, but I think it was white). Temperature went to about 2400K, but they were now too cold and the photos’ joyous atmosphere vaporized. We were celebrating and having a poker with alcohol, yet they now looked like photos taken in a morgue…
I don’t think there was something objectively wrong, but the feeling is not the one I had while shooting them. Nor the one I wanted people to have while looking at them.
I manually changed the photos to about 2650K (didn’t touch “tint”, only “temperature”). They didn’t look too orange, but at the same time they didn’t feel depressing. I think it was the best compromise I could get.
How do you guys do it? I’m no professional so I went by feeling. What would you have done in this case? Should I have left Lightroom’s auto choice, despite the “morgue effect”?
P.S. Shooting RAW with a Nikon D3500, in case it matters.
I adjust by artist interpretation. If I take pictures on cold winter day with gray skies and maybe wind blowing strong, I may turn the temperature down to make the shot feel colder, like the viewer was there.
Stars at night are daylight so I set my K between 4500-5000 or Daylight for settings.
I forget to set my white balance to flash when using one, the pictures may come out too bluish sometimes so up the warmth in the pictures.
For sunsets, you have that warth feeling so I may bump the K by 250 to 500 to provide the sunset light to the whole screen. Just a tinge of sunlight all over the ground.
Use Lightroom to adjust the picture anyway you want. You want all your picture to have an orange/purplish tint, do it for a picture, then create a preset to apply it to any pictures you want.
Basically I set my picture control to Neutral for my Z6 and the pictures will look very dull in Lightroom. From there, I adjust them to how I want the viewer to feel the scene. But I could just as easily convert to black and white or reverse colors, ie make my reds become, blue, greens to red, etc.
You can do whatever you want to your pictures. Lightroom is a tool, nothing more.
Don’t trust anything except a well calibrated monitor.
Any auto white balance is just a best guess. Sometimes it useful to get you closer to the end result, but always judge based on what looks right.
Auto white balance under artificial lights is often still hit and miss.
My old 6D would especially struggle with warm artificial light. Pictures usually came out super warm.
When I noticed after a couple of shots that the temperature looked odd I’d usually took out a white handkerchief and I’d hold tight in front of the lens while setting the wb manually. There are special wb cards you can buy but a hanky works too
The ‘right’ temperature is what makes a white object appear white. Of course in practice most ‘white’ objects are not perfectly white, so unless you snapped a grey card it’s quite hard to get it just right, but if it looks right to you it’s unlikely anyone else will notice.
Skip the dropper and use the slider until you like what you see
If I think the white balance is off I’ll start by using the eye dropper to see what lightroom thinks it should be and then do some adjustments afterwards. So it ends up being by feeling.
Which is why I can come back a week later and feel like I should change it slightly again.
I think a dark imagine can be difficult to find a satisfactory WB.
That was my feeling as well. Thank you for confirming the process I was using made sense!
I mostly shoot landscapes, and basically never shoot indoors or with other artificial light, so my experience is probably not relevant to your specific question. But it might help in a broader sense.
As someone here pointed out, the “correct” white balance might be defined as one that makes a white object appear white. Suppose we all agree that snow is white… But what colour should it appear in a photo taken before sunrise? And how should it look right after sunrise, when it’s directly lit by a very low sun? To me, that’s some shade of blue/cyan and red/orange, respectively.
I also record and process raw files. The white balance setting on my camera is pretty much always on Daylight; that’s the best starting point for me (again, in natural light outdoors). Any white-balance adjustment I make from there is usually subtle.