Beating the Auto White Balance

[Geoff Chandler]

Lets be honest- most of the time these modern cameras do a pretty good job
using Auto White balance.
However - some situations and certain colours will trip it up sometimes.
At these times it is handy to have some idea about other White balance settings.
I am just giving ONE example - nit a sermon on White balance and colour temperatures etc.
Mauves and Purples - they can be a problem!You load your image on the PC
or even before then - on your camera screen and think - Hmm - that's not the colour it was.
Generally - evening colours and shades are bluer and midday sunshine is redder. Auto WB usually copes with this fairly well, but fill your screen with a
colour like purple - especially early evening time - and the likelyhood is you will get a blue flower.
If this happens and you really don't want to get techie - change the white balance to Cloudy - or if that is still not enough - Shady - these are redder and will remove the blueness.
Below is an example of 2 such photos taken one after the other (- OK I manually selected a colour temp - but it was the same as Cloudy).

[Geoff Chandler]

OK? The difference is quite visible - notice also that the yellow green foliage was not so much affected by the different white balnce setting...
Now
if you encounter a situation like this - it is always worth rattling off a few extra shots in case one isnt up to scratch - in my example the Right hand image was blown a bit in the wind resulting in some blur (when I looked close)
So - seeing as I only took 2 photos - I now have to tweak the wrongly coloured image in order to have a sharp image and the correct White balance:

Summary: -
*Purples may need more red - 'cloudy' is redder than 'auto' or 'daylight'.
*Evenings are have a bluer tone to the light, midday is redder.

Here's the 1st image colour tweaked to correct it: