This is the last of the pictures of Belfast I took from the night shooting trip.
I’ve mentioned before that my camera can take both jpeg and raw pictures at the same time. To date I’ve been relying on the jpegs for posts here. There’s never been a coherent reason for this, just one of those things.
But, after the discussions about colour warmth I decided to take a look at the raw files generated and see if you really could do the whole white balance thing after the fact.
OK, so here’s what I’ve found so far…
Most dSLR’s have the ability to change the white balance of the shot as it’s being taken. this is to allow you to compensate for the lighting conditions of the scene. For example, an indoor scenes can have a different cast from different artificial lighting setups. Equally, outside can have different lighting shades depending on the time of day/year.
…So they tell me…
Fortunately most cameras have the ability to handle white balance automatically. So I’ve ignored it.
However, if you use your raw files, your camera editing software and packages like Lightroom allow you to make some post processing changes. On eof these is the White Balance.
Here’s some examples of this:
Automatic White Balance
Shade
Tungsten
Fluorescent
All these shots used the following settings:
(15secs, f/9, aperture priority, focal length – 28mm, ISO – 100, 24/10/07 18:51)
You can get some really nice effects playing with this.
If it was me, I’d leave the camera on Auto and leave any editing to the post processing stage.