Can a color card improve auto white balance, or should I use a gray card and custom WB?
Asked 1/23/2013
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My camera’s auto white balance is often inaccurate. Instead of relying on AWB, would placing a calibrated color card in the scene help the camera determine the correct white balance? I was also wondering whether a phone app could read such a card and suggest camera settings. Ignoring post-processing, what’s the practical way to get accurate white balance in-camera?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
13y ago
2 Answers
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You can't apply a permanent, one-time correction, because light changes. Auto-white balance tries to guess at the color temperature of the light (See Does Auto White-Balance Really Work? How?, as @dpollitt noted), but there's no per-camera correction to auto-wb that would always make sense. If it were as easy as that, Nikon (and all other camera makers) would just have that calibration applied in the first place.
But to make the right adjustment for the light in a given scene, you don't need a colored card, and you don't need an app. You just need a neutral gray card. Your camera, like every DSLR has a built-in way to set a custom white balance from a neutral gray object in a scene.
In your camera, it's called "Preset Manual" (PRE on the shooting menu.) This is described on page 154 in your camera's manual. You can either read from the scene in front of you, or from a previously-taken photo.
Grey is sufficient because white balance is primarily a shift along an orange-blue axis, with maybe a little bit along magenta-green. Knowing what the center is supposed to be is all the information needed.
For precise color calibration, one would use a more complicated chart. But you don't need that for white balance; you just need the gray card. And conversely, it won't help at all if you photograph the target in one light but then your subject in a different one.
Originally by user1943. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1943
13y ago
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A color card won’t really “improve” auto white balance in a permanent way, because white balance depends on the light in each scene, and that can change constantly. There isn’t a one-time per-camera correction that will make AWB consistently right under all lighting.
For accurate in-camera white balance, the practical solution is to use a neutral gray card and set a custom white balance from it. Most DSLRs and mirrorless cameras include a custom/preset manual white balance mode specifically for this purpose. You place the gray card in the same light as your subject, fill the frame or otherwise follow your camera’s instructions, and store that reading as the white balance setting.
So: no special color card or phone app is necessary for the core task. A gray card plus your camera’s built-in custom WB feature is the standard approach when AWB is unreliable.
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