Frustrated with Auto WB. Any better workflows for a JPG shooter?

[kimballistic]

Hi everyone!  Generally speaking I shoot with auto white balance and it meets my expectations about 80% of the time.  The other 20%, however, is quite frustrating.

 

For example, I shot an indoor graduation recently on AWB and the white balance changed significantly with each shot depending on what objects I had in the frame and which direction I was shooting in.  I totally understand why and I'm not saying this is Fuji's problem.  However, in order to get consistent skin tones across the shoot I had to override the white balance on all the photos, something I'm not too keen on doing.  I much prefer to use JPGs out of the camera, although I do shoot JPG+RAW in case I absolutely have to do extensive editing.

 

 

So, any gurus out there have a better idea, one that doesn't require too much fiddling with custom white balances or guessing the tungsten vs. flourescent proportions of indoor lighting?  I also have a colorchecker passport but that would really kill the spontaneity of shooting family & friends.

 

I've heard a few people suggest always shooting in daylight or cloudy white balance.  Anyone here do that?  If so, how's that going?

 

[aceflibble]

I almost always set the white balance using Kelvin. Fuji's preset white balances—daylight/fine, shade, etc—all run slightly blue and slightly tinted green compared to industry standards. Auto WB also tends towards cooler tones. However, the Kelvin settings are exactly what they state they are. It takes some getting used to, but eventually you will just pick up a sense for what K setting you should be using for any particular space. Of ocurse, with mirrorless cameras you get the bonus feature of being able to preview the white balance ont he screen, so it's very easy to figure out and learn which K setting to use in any situation.

Otherwise, stick with raw. Importing a raw file, normalising the white balance across all your files and exporting again is hardly extensive. If you keep to raw files you'll always have the white balance you want and you'll get a sharper image, too. For something like a graduation I would never risk relying on .jpg files. There's no way to make Auto WB reliable.

[kimballistic]

I just really enjoy Fuji's colors, especially from their film simulations.  I'd prefer not to give that up.  I know Lightroom comes close but it's not close enough, and it's just too clunky in its file handling (no elegant JPG & RAW handling of the same photo, for example, like Aperture used to be able to do).

[aceflibble]

Yet to have a problem with handling both jpg and raw in Lightroom myself, though usually when I shoot raw+jpg I discard the jpg anyway; even when I do keep them both, Lightroom can stack or separate them as required, you have many options. As for colour handling and the film simulations, I recently did a test here where I show the only major difference between the in-camera film simulations and the Lightroom versions is with pure green, which is easily compensated for by the H/S/L sliders. Considering how much detail and sharpness you lose with Fuji's in-camera .jpg files, I consider it a more than favourable trade to use Lightroom. If you want the Lightroom colours to match Fuji's exactly, you can set Lightroom to automatically tweak the green tones in all Fuji raw files on import. Then the only thing .jpg is giving you is faster save/import/export times, while raw gives you the white balance control you're asking for and sharper, more detailed images.

 

Or, as I said before, I'm a big advocate of getting used to setting your white balance with the Kelvin option (even if you shoot raw, in fact), and that solves your Auto WB problem. Live with the Kelvin setting for a week or two and it'll become second nature and won't slow you down in the slightest, and the colour is more correct than with the Fuji preset white balances. If you learn to set temperature in Kelvin, your .jpgs will have the right colour balance every time.

 

Fact is, there is no way to make Auto WB work as accurately as you want. If there was, there would be no point in the other options existing at all. Auto WB will always give you a different balance on every shot you take, even in consistent lighting. The preset white balance options in Fuji cameras have large colour shifts towards blue and green, which is a big problem for those skin tones you previously mentioned. Kelvin does what you want, raw does what you want. Every other option gives you either inconsistency or inaccuracy. I wish there was a simple button to press to make Auto WB nail it perfectly every single time and smartly know when to keep with the same balance between shots, but we're still years, if not decades, away from that technology. I wish Fuji would make their WB presets accurate to industry standards, but Fuji built their name on cool-tinted film so they want their cameras to lean towards cool tones, too, and we're unlikely to see that 'fixed', ever. 

[kimballistic]

Thank's for the comments aceflibble, I will explore shooting with Kelvin and take another look at Lightroom.

 

This seems useful:

 

http://www.clickinmoms.com/blog/color-by-kelvin-a-better-approach-to-white-balance/

[flysurfer]

You can always change the white balance after the fact. It may be worth exploring custom white balance before the fact, though, at least for those 20% of cases where AWB is off (or simply not meeting your taste or your vision of the scene).

 

Or maybe use one of the WB presets after the fact...