Manual white balance vs. presets?

[Mark-P]

If shooting indoors with a light kit, when would you want to use the 3.2k preset vs. manually white balancing the camera?

Thanks.

[crs127]

I would do manual as much as possible.

[Ted Spencer]

Always white balance manually unless you just have to grab the camera, turn it on and shoot something before it disappears. If you've got time to set up lights, then...

[William_Robinette]

I almost always use the presets and then gel my lights to match, unless I am in some wonky situation. I find I get more natural skin tones this way.

[J.R. Hudson]

Considering color temp can run across such a huge scale, manually White Balancing is the way to go whenever possible.

[ROne]

Ive started using presets and the jury is still out whether this is any better/worse than performing manual wb.

I had read somewhere (and I don't know how true this is across the board) that presets were calibrated to an exact degree. But the manual white balance is down to the camera's interpretation (and the quality position of your WB source) and to that end my add or remove blue/orange with varying degrees of success. Whereas if you're working with presets you always have a reference point to add your own CC in post.

Don 't know how true that theory is, but I've been okay with presets recently.

[THoff]

Of course the presets were also created under specific environmental conditions -- if you are shooting in a cold or hot environment, that will affect the CCDs and the whitebalance.

[cardmaverick]

In a camera like the HVX200, all of your white balance settings mess around with gain in the blue and red channels.

Manual or preset, it doesn't matter.

The bigger issue is entering post with something thats usable. Just because your manual white balance looks more neutral than a "correct" preset, it doesn't mean the manual balance will produce a cleaner image.

And thats just the thing.... you can either correct in camera or in post, but either way you slice it, some channels will most likely need to be boosted somewhere along the way, in varying amounts, either in the analog world or the digital world.

Your best bet is optical filtering.

Unfiltered manual white balance or unfiltered use of a preset white balance will never match a carefully calculated optical balance, combined with a manual white balance that lowers red and blue channel gain as much as possible. If you filter optically and carefully trick your white balance manually, you can produce cleaner images, and also increase your highlight dynamic range.

Try 60ccM on your lens. White balance threw it, and then shoot with it on. If you encounter color temperatures lower than 3200K, take the filter off, or decrease to about 30ccM. Works like a charm for me. :thumbsup:

[kstnate]

I agree with cameramaverick, but on a practical level (I haven't gotten around to getting a magenta filter, and there are potential issues with filtration vs coated lenses...) I have found that on almost every other camera I have used, I would use Preset when using my light kit (known 3200K sources) but with HVX200 pretset looks too green. So HVX200 is only camera that I white balance when doing controlled lit interviews. Filter would be better I suppose, but haven't figured out exactly how much cc I need. guess I could try above suggestions.