I thoroughly enjoyed reading your insights on the importance of white balance in black-and-white photography. It’s fascinating how the initial white balance setting can significantly impact the final output, especially in landscape photography. Your detailed examples, like the adjustments made to the red and yellow sliders, clearly illustrate the creative possibilities and technical considerations involved. Thanks for sharing such valuable tips and techniques!
Ok, but… please correct any misconceptions in the following.
My functional understanding of white balance is that all possible settings other than Auto are static. Daylight will yield the same temperature and tint regardless of the photo for all shots, both in camera and (with separate presets) in Lightroom etc. So if you’re doing any post with RAW files WB in camera really doesn’t matter; one can always reset WB presets after the fact to what the camera settings would be, or anything else.
Auto WB in camera and in Lightroom and with the dropper all attempt to set WB based on a perceived neutral gray setting within the shot; the difference being whether the camera or software or user picks the area to determine that neutral tone. The reason one would always use Auto WB in camera is simply to see what the camera thinks is neutral and have that input while adjusting in post - more reference data to work with.
Using the WB dropper on a given area will give the same temperature and tint regardless of the profile; color, monochrome, or whatever. Playing around with the WB sliders - or WB dropper in different areas of a monochrome image - does change the resulting grayscale values in interesting and non-linear ways. (See how the histogram changes as you adjust Temp/Tint!) Definitely worth exploring.
Generally... yes this is correct. WB is part of the RAW decode and you can set whatever value you want in camera or in post and it will turn out the same... IE it's not baked into the sensor data.
The point of this article was that it happens very early in the RAW decode and can and will affect your BW color mix controls to small or (if a significant cast is present) huge degrees to the point of making those controls useless.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your insights on the importance of white balance in black-and-white photography. It’s fascinating how the initial white balance setting can significantly impact the final output, especially in landscape photography. Your detailed examples, like the adjustments made to the red and yellow sliders, clearly illustrate the creative possibilities and technical considerations involved. Thanks for sharing such valuable tips and techniques!
Ok, but… please correct any misconceptions in the following.
My functional understanding of white balance is that all possible settings other than Auto are static. Daylight will yield the same temperature and tint regardless of the photo for all shots, both in camera and (with separate presets) in Lightroom etc. So if you’re doing any post with RAW files WB in camera really doesn’t matter; one can always reset WB presets after the fact to what the camera settings would be, or anything else.
Auto WB in camera and in Lightroom and with the dropper all attempt to set WB based on a perceived neutral gray setting within the shot; the difference being whether the camera or software or user picks the area to determine that neutral tone. The reason one would always use Auto WB in camera is simply to see what the camera thinks is neutral and have that input while adjusting in post - more reference data to work with.
Using the WB dropper on a given area will give the same temperature and tint regardless of the profile; color, monochrome, or whatever. Playing around with the WB sliders - or WB dropper in different areas of a monochrome image - does change the resulting grayscale values in interesting and non-linear ways. (See how the histogram changes as you adjust Temp/Tint!) Definitely worth exploring.
Generally... yes this is correct. WB is part of the RAW decode and you can set whatever value you want in camera or in post and it will turn out the same... IE it's not baked into the sensor data.
The point of this article was that it happens very early in the RAW decode and can and will affect your BW color mix controls to small or (if a significant cast is present) huge degrees to the point of making those controls useless.
RB
Yes, and thank you for pointing that out! I hadn’t looked at that closely before, lots to play with here…