7D, WB, picture style and other mysteries

[whited3]

First up I must apologies for being such a slack bugger over the last few months. Work and other pressures have given me little time to play with my new 7D and I've found the 7D to be such a step up in performance and complexity compared to the 500D I'm having a lot of trouble getting a feel for it, all of which has dampened my enthusiasm. Time will tell.

Anyway, to my questions........

In the couple of years I had the 500D I learnt to trust the camera's WB settings and so would generally leave ACR set to "as shot". Not so the 7D!

The picture below was taken yesterday morning around 8 AM under a clear blue sky but also under a lot of trees.

7D, Canon 50m f1.4 @ f2.5, ISO 400, 1/200, AWB had selected Shade. ACR set to "as shot". No other adjustments made.



Below is the same image but with ACR set to auto.


To my eye the second image is true in terms of colour. One thing I have done is set the 7D's picture style to Faithful where as the 500D was always on Standard.

Ideas, comments, advice please...

[Colin Southern]

Hi Mark,

I'm not sure what you mean when you say "AWB had selected Shade".

Keep in mind that a RAW exposure doesn't actually have a colour temperature for white balancing - so in ACR if you select one of the presets (sunny / cloudy etc) then it just white balances the shot to that temperature without any other considerations. AUTO tells ACR to "make it's best guess" (so nothing to do with the camera), so only AS SHOT uses the metadata tag that the camera passes. So only AUTO WB on the camera and AS SHOT in ACR will be leaving the WB up to the cameras discretion.

With regards to the two images, the first looks far too warm, and the 2nd looks slightly too cool to my eye, but that's just a "mark 1 eye ball" evaluation. For truely accurate results then the only thing that's going to do it at the time would be to use a gray card.

Keep in mind too that if you're shooting under green foliage then the light that gets through will most likely be shifted towards green (it's a bit like putting a green gel on a flash).

PS: Picture styles don't enter into the equasion - they're not "applied" to the RAW shot in anyway - they're only passed as metadata tags, which ACR ignors. When shooting RAW, the ONLY thing that they change is the image on the camera's review screen (when processing with anything but DPP).

[whited3]

I'm not sure what you mean when you say "AWB had selected Shade".

What I meant was that the camera was in AWB mode and selecting Shade in ACR gave me the same WB as "as shot".

Colin, thanks so much for the feedback. I've learnt a number of things!

[Colin Southern]

What I meant was that the camera was in AWB mode and selecting Shade in ACR gave me the same WB as "as shot".

Just a co-incidence I'd say - as far as I know, the camera doesn't try to align itself with any common WB preset when setting the WB in auto.

Colin, thanks so much for the feedback. I've learnt a number of things!

No worries Mark - if in doubt, just buy a gray card -- if nothing else, it gives you a known starting point.