Holly blue and a gatekeeper

[lesno1]

[DanK]

nice captures. Where do you go to find so many butterflies to photograph?

I don't know what hte flowers are, of course, but given what I would see here, the petals have a strong greenish cast. Is that what they really looked like? I did a very quick adjustment in Adobe Camera Raw to get it closer to the similar flowers I see around here, like black-eyed Susans. I also dodged the butterfly to bring it out more. Is this closer to the color of the flowers you saw?

[Geoff F]

I would guess those flowers are Ragwort, which is a really bright yellow.

How do you set your colour balance, Les? Auto White Balance usually does a good job but under dull conditions, with no pure white to give a starting point, these false colours can easily occur.

[lesno1]

I would guess those flowers are Ragwort, which is a really bright yellow.

How do you set your colour balance, Les? Auto White Balance usually does a good job but under dull conditions, with no pure white to give a starting point, these false colours can easily occur.

Hi Geoff yes i do use auto white balance but i sometimes pop them in lightroom ,i find the butterflies on wild blackberries behind my garden those flowers are some sort of weed around 4 feet high a bit like . I just googled Ragwort and i think you're correct it looks very much like that

[DanK]

It does look like ragwort.

AWB often works well but sometimes fails badly. I think this is a case where it failed.

If you're shooting JPEG, you'll have less flexibility in changing the mistakes that AWB makes. If you shoot raw, the color data in the file aren't affected by however Lightroom renders it, and even very severe errors can often be fixed. I did a demonstration of this some time ago, but I don't recall whether I posted it here.

I set the camera to take a test shot at both 6000K, which was too high for the lighting, and 2500K, which was much too low. I shot raw. Because the photos have neutral whites, I was able to color balance both every easily. You'll see that the final products are identical despite the error in the capture.

Shot at 2500, not balanced:



Shot at 6000K, not balanced:




Shot at 2500K, balanced:




Shot at 6000K, balanced:

[lesno1]

Thanks Dan thats interesting i do shoot raw but ive always used AWB time to learn hoe to set it i think

[lesno1]

nice captures. Where do you go to find so many butterflies to photograph?

I don't know what hte flowers are, of course, but given what I would see here, the petals have a strong greenish cast. Is that what they really looked like? I did a very quick adjustment in Adobe Camera Raw to get it closer to the similar flowers I see around here, like black-eyed Susans. I also dodged the butterfly to bring it out more. Is this closer to the color of the flowers you saw?

Thanks Dan yes it is much closer

[Manfred M]

Thanks Dan thats interesting i do shoot raw but ive always used AWB time to learn hoe to set it i think

Many raw convertors will apply the "as shot" WB setting when the file is opened. There is nothing to prevent you from tweaking that value. This is usually one of my first steps when opening an image.

[xpatUSA]

Thanks Dan that's interesting. I do shoot raw but I've always used AWB ... time to learn how to set it, I think.

Les, I agree with others about not using Auto WB especially in that flower shot. The reason being that the image area is over 50 per cent green but some Auto WB algorithms assume that the average image color is gray - the so-called "Gray World" method - which tends to get minor color areas like the petals a bit wrong.

Perhaps one should use the nearest camera WB for the ambient lighting and indeed clever folks can adjust the Kelvin and tint later in post.

It is tempting to suggest the convention of carrying a white card as a reference or for Custom WB. I do carry one and ...

... never use it, LOL.

[DanK]

I do carry a whiBal a lot of the time, but there really isn't time to use one in doing individual bug shots in the field. Bugs tend not to be sufficiently patient.

However, the good news is what Manfred wrote: there original rendering--in this case by Lightroom--doesn't affect the actual data in the stored image at all. This isn't true with JPEGs, of course. For that reason, simply playing with the temp and tint sliders can usually get you to a perfectly acceptable WB. In my experience, it's relatively uncommon to need to fuss with tint, but I suspect this varies depending on the camera's WB algorithms.

If you're going to be shooting a bunch of shots in similar conditions, shooting one shot with a neutral card and using that to set WB can give you a better starting point for manual adjustment of other images from the same shoot.

[lesno1]

Thanks guys this is so interesting i had no idea WB makes so much difference