Olympus-OM
[Top] [All Lists]

[OM] Re: white balance madness

Subject: [OM] Re: white balance madness
From: Winsor Crosby <wincros@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2006 09:23:40 -0800
High school physics actually deals with light temperature, not  
chemistry.

I think you are on the right track. Actually I think that the  
automatic setting deals with it better than fiddling with settings.  
In spite of reviewers' frequent misunderstanding that the automatic  
setting should render white as white in any light and criticize  
makers that do not do that, I think that camera makers understand  
that cloudy days that are not a little bluish and sunsets that are  
not warm just look weird. The goal of the automatic setting seems to  
be to provide a pleasing rendition that looks natural. So it cools  
down sunsets a bit and warms cloudy/rainy days a bit according to the  
taste of the people who set up the camera. The nice thing is that the  
adjustment is then close enough so that metering is not thrown off  
too much and minor adjustments in post processing can done for your  
taste without doing great violence to even an 8 bit JPEG.

The other thing is that subject matter will influence what you want  
to do. A sunset shot may look nicest with all that red light coloring  
the image, but a portrait lit by that red light will definitely need  
much more adjustment to cool it down. Nothing uglier to me than a  
picture of someone with the face all featureless because the red  
channel is blown.



Winsor
Long Beach, California, USA




On Nov 8, 2006, at 8:54 AM, Richard Lovison wrote:

> Color temperature never posed a problem... the lower the  
> temperature in
> degrees Kelvin, the warmer or more red and yellow the light.  The  
> higher the
> temperature, the more blue the light source.  High school chemistry.



==============================================
List usage info:     http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies:        olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Sponsored by Tako
Impressum | Datenschutz