white balance and shooting RAW. SP-350

[ThatsSomeBadHatHarry]

All of this is a great help.

 

[Charlie99]

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.

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.

Could you look a little bit closer and see if the picture DATA changes according to your camera settings. You can check that easily by taking those photos you posted, and change the RAW converter settings so that the setting are the same for all pictures. I'm betting that with the same setting for things like color temperature, etc., that the various photos you took with different white balance settings will now look the same.

My reading of the Canon manual is that the RAW image contains both the picture/sensor info, plus the current settings of the camera for things like color space and white balance. The white balance and other settings, however, are not applied in the camera and don't affect the recorded picture/sensor data, and are only applied after the fact by the RAW viewer/converter program running on your PC. Unlike the case where the white balance was applied to the data in the camera to make a jpeg, with RAW you still have the low level sensor data and can change white balance after the fact with no loss of info.

On at least some of the Canon RAW viewer/converter programs, on the list boxes of settings for the various parameters, the settings on the camera at the time the photo was taken will be either highlighted or bolded. You can still change them though, because those camera settings are only applied to the data once it is on our PC. But the recorded settings are the default or starting point used to process the RAW data until you change them to something else.

To the casual observer, it would indeed look like the white balance setting on the camera affects the RAW data, but in reality, it is only affecting how it is processed in your PC after the fact.

Charlie Allen

 

[joewr]

Pardon me for coming in at the 11th hour here, but I wanted to share something I have done that has helped in my uw photography. However, I have a Nikon D100 and do not know whether your cameras have the same properties. If they do, have a look.

I can bring up the histogram--like the ones you have shown in your previous posts--immediately upon taking a picture. This is a tremendous help in making certain the color saturation and white balance are what I want.

I almost always use the manual mode underwater and the histogram has proven to be the biggest aid to good exposure parameters.

joewr

 

[Charlie59]

I think that means your mom wears army boots j.

 

[Jeff Toorish]

Could you look a little bit closer and see if the picture DATA changes according to your camera settings. You can check that easily by taking those photos you posted, and change the RAW converter settings so that the setting are the same for all pictures. I'm betting that with the same setting for things like color temperature, etc., that the various photos you took with different white balance settings will now look the same.

My reading of the Canon manual is that the RAW image contains both the picture/sensor info, plus the current settings of the camera for things like color space and white balance. The white balance and other settings, however, are not applied in the camera and don't affect the recorded picture/sensor data, and are only applied after the fact by the RAW viewer/converter program running on your PC. Unlike the case where the white balance was applied to the data in the camera to make a jpeg, with RAW you still have the low level sensor data and can change white balance after the fact with no loss of info.

On at least some of the Canon RAW viewer/converter programs, on the list boxes of settings for the various parameters, the settings on the camera at the time the photo was taken will be either highlighted or bolded. You can still change them though, because those camera settings are only applied to the data once it is on our PC. But the recorded settings are the default or starting point used to process the RAW data until you change them to something else.

To the casual observer, it would indeed look like the white balance setting on the camera affects the RAW data, but in reality, it is only affecting how it is processed in your PC after the fact.

Charlie Allen

Charlie,

In RAW I can change the setting once in the capture mode. No question about that, I can also tweak the white balance in each mode. But, on my cameras at least, there is no such thing as "NO WHITE BALANCE" setting, so a decision has to be made. You can either go with Automatic White Balance AWB, which I find to work sometimes but mostly I use it only when I'm shooting in a fast changing lighting situation. If the light is going to be consistent, I will set a custom white balance.

The fact is, in RAW, I can change all sorts of things, including aperature, speed and more.

But the question the original poster asked was, does color balance affect RAW, which it does. It affects the output to the capture, even though it can be changed. Incidentally, I have also found after shooting digital for nearly a decade that the closer I can get the balance in the original shot, the better the final color is. Playing around with the settings in capture and post production often does not yield the same results.

I mean, theoretically you could never touch the white balance if you shoot in RAW, and just try to fix in in capture or post but to me, trying to get it during the actual photo works better.

There are decisions that have to be made at every step of the photo process, if I don't make them, then the camera will.

Jeff

 

[Jeff Toorish]

You know, I'm just reading back through this thread, seeing if I missed something. I'm not sure we are disagreeing, actually.

I'm not suggesting that White Balance premanently affects the image, only that it sets some paramaters that, in my cameras at least, are visible during capture. But then can be changed in RAW.

Just want to be clear about that.



Jeff