Manual White Balance

[CameraDan]

I have a Cannon Powershot S2 and have never really used the manual white balance. But I noticed that pictures I was taking in a particular room in my house always came out with really bad color (the room has dark wood paneling on the walls and has poor natural light). So I started playing around with manually setting the white balance and got much better results.

My question is this (and I'll admit up front, may be a dumb one). Is the idea to always evaluate white against something that is completely white? What if it is only close to white? I thought about putting a white cloth or index card in my camera bag to always have on hand. Is that a good approach? Is there a better way to do this to obtain the best color balancing in a picture?

[lisa nolan]

Hi CameraDan. I normally don't worry about the white balance setting while taking the photo, as I like to shoot in RAW and then do the white balance adjustment later in Lightroom, which is fast and easy. But here is a good (a bit technical though) tutorial on white balance: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.htm

I've seen other people using gray cards. Here's an interesting article as to why gray is used vs. white, as well as tips for using a Pringle's chips lid (!) to help you manually set the white balance:
http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips.html