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Auto Sync and White Balance
Brandon Oelling has been extolling the virtues of AutoSync on this blog, and for good reason. It can make quick work of adjusting dozens or hundreds of images at once, especially for simple adjustments like exposure and contrast. There's one thing I have to chime in to what Brandon has covered so far: AutoSync, and it's cousin Sync, totally rock in my experience for setting White Balance for a large number of photos after the fact.
Think about it. You'll normally shot quite a few shots in each lighting environment that you're in. Your exposure may shift shot to shot, but the color of the lights remain the same. So it's a no brainer. All you need is a target neutral and AutoSync. Here's a quick cheat sheet:
After that, one click on your neutral and all of your images in a group are set to the correct white balance at once.
Of course, you should really try to get your white balance set right out in the field. That way you don't have to spend any post-processing time dealing with it. But that's not always possible or convenient. When needed, Auto Sync can make it as painless as possible.
Comments (3)
One important point to remember when syncing (or copying/pasting) white balance is that when the source white balance is "As Shot", the destinations are set to "As Shot" and not to whatever the source as-shot temp/tint happened to be.
This is a great feature, unless, of course, you intended to copy the actual temp/tint instead of the "as shotness". An easy way to copy the actual temp/tint is to change "As Shot" to "Custom". The white-balance temp/tint itself won't change (at least if you've not set a custom WB for this picture before), but now when you sync, it'll copy the temp/tint itself.
One small note about where you're eyedropping in the screenshot, it's generally best to sample the brightest part of the card that's not clipped and doesn't have a lot of direct reflections (the sticker part can sometimes have excessive direct reflections). The brighter the part you sample, the more accurate the conversion possible...
James,
Can you explain a bit more the trick of using the WhiBal card to apply a neutral target? Seems like you'd have to use a WhiBal shot _from every scene_ rather than a single studio shot.
waywest: If you're going to use a white balance card, you have to have a shot of it in every lighting condition you find yourself in. If you shoot each frame in a new place, then you'd need a lot of white balance shots. If you're shooting dozens or hundreds of frames in the same lighting condition, you just need the one.
Of course, white balance after the fact is just one way to do it. Wherever possible, I try to get it right in camera using an expodisc or the like before taking the shot, but when that's not possible, following up a set of shots with a whibal shot is just the trick.