white balance and shooting RAW. SP-350

[ThatsSomeBadHatHarry]

So, yesterday was my first real outing with my camera and I've been shooting topside quite a bit to get used to it.

I was taking some shots of a turtle in a fairly open setting. I used the "one touch white balance" setting and all the colors were where I wanted them to be. On my viewfinder the picture came out as it should have, with the colors adjusted. Problem being, once i put the pictures on my laptop and put it into the RAW editor (I'm using the photo editing software that came with the camera), it was as if I never adjusted the WB in the first place. I took a separate shot in jpeg earlier and it looked as it should have.

I was very limited in the color adjustment because the "color temperature" was maxed out, and still washed out.

Is this normal? Or do I need photoshop?

 

[Charlie99]

The concept behind RAW is that you get the naked, unaltered, unprocessed data from the camera and do any correction after the fact.

The white balance of your camera has no effect on the RAW data. That's because it is the relatively "raw" data as it comes out of the sensors, without processing for things like sharpening, brightness adjustment, color balance, etc.

My understanding is that the only processing performed by the camera is the pixel by pixel offgset and gain correction that compensates for errors and variations in the pixels of the sensor.

 

[Jim Greenfield]

I agree with Charlie and as I shoot RAW 100% of the time, I make any adjustment required in the Raw converter when I see what I've got. In fact the auto setting in Adobe Camera Raw does a great job and I find very little need to play about with what it suggests.
However, I think you will find that any settings you make on your camera, although disregarded by RAW, will have an influence on the image displayed on your LCD. This is basically a JPEG which the camera processes from what you have captured in RAW and it uses the settings you have made on the camera. At least that is the case on my 5D and you may want to check if your camera is similar.

 

[Warren_L]

As the others have said, the in-camera white balance settings will have no effect on the RAW data produced from the camera. What is shown on the LCD screen is basically a rendered .JPG. So really, when shooting RAW, white balance is really not important unless you want to have an idea of what results proper white balance might look like on-camera after your shots. I don't bother with white balance myself when shooting RAW as it makes no difference and I find that conditions can change frequently during a dive, so adjusting it become more of a pain to do.

 

[HowardE]

I agree with everyone else. You need Photoshop, or some other RAW image processing program - it will have a color temp adjustment there. Doing WB on the dive is mostly a waste of time for RAW images.

 

[Jeff Toorish]

Okay, I don't know what kind of cameras you guys are using, but with my Canon cameras RAW certainly is affected by the white balance options. I use a custom white for most shooting and when I don't there is a definate color cast (although sometimes the automatic setting does a pretty good job).

The attached photo is a screen shot from the Canon capture program, I shot this minutes ago using different white balance options while shooting in RAW. I think you can see the differences based on the different settions.

The notion that RAW is some sort of completely clean, untouched image is just not true, at least with Canon cameras.

Jeff

 

[HowardE]

Jeff - which camera are you using?

My wife has a Canon S70 and the RAW is RAW - regardless of what WB "mode" you use.

My Nikon D200 is RAW - regardless of what I do with WB. the WB presets are for JPEGs. Also - In photoshop RAW imager, there is a slider - notice the screen shot -

On the right, you see the temp. Your software must be writing some additional informaiton appended to the RAW, or a seperate file entirely which saves some RAW conversion info. In Photoshop, when I adjust a RAW file, there is saved a "XMP" file with additional PS conversion info. If I tell photoshop to disregard all previous RAW conversions, it reverts to the original RAW - RAW image.

 

[Jeff Toorish]

Canon EOS 1D MKII, Canon 20D, among others.

For me, white balance would be a useless function if it didn't work in RAW.

The questions was, does white balance affect RAW and it does. I set white balance based on the conditions, I only shoot in RAW, most of my cameras have never been shot any other way, and there is no doubt that the white balance setting affects them.

So, with your cameras, if you set different white balance settings, shoot RAW, and compare the photos in the capture program, you don't see any difference?

Jeff

 

[HowardE]

Personally, I think of WB as a relative setting, since the RAW imager has the slide bar or some other temperature control setting... I would go with my original guess that the WB setting on the camera saves a file with setting info, and that if you use the cameras software, it reads the saved info, and uses those adjustments as a "baseline"

 

[HowardE]

Here's another screen shot from Photoshop CS2's RAW imager.

You'll notice that most of the auto WB modes are presets.

All you're doing with manual WB is setting the color temperature - which is completely relative, and can be changed, so is there really a difference if you do it on the camera or in the software? You have to process the images anyway in software, so why waste time (while on a dive) with setting manual WB??