White balance

[Otter]

My Nurse Shark video was taken in about 20fsw of clear Cozumel water with the UR Pro Blue Water filter and no lights. I generally only use lights at night as the unit is more compact and I didn't buy a spare set of batteries.

I have heard/read that you don't need the filter at shallow depths, but my experience has been otherwise. Take a look at this short clip comparing with and without a filter, taken in Belize at 12fsw with 50+ viz and good overhead sun.

As for White Balance, my PC-110 has LANC and the L&M housing uses LANC to control the camera. It does NOT have a white balance accessible during diving.

Also, if you take a look at my Catalina video snippets (Local Diving), they are using the same filter, but in conditions closer to green.

 

[ChrisA]

I've been wanting to try this....

Get a blue card (easy to make if you have a color ink jet printer)
Before you place the camera in the housing but after attaching any filter to the camera use the camera's manual white ballance feature on the LCD touch screen to set the white balance using the blue card. Now the camera is set to remove massive amounts of blue and should make your blue card look white.

One Idea I had for making a blue card is to use my still camera to photograph a dive slate while set to "sunlight". This should result in capturing the exact shade of blue/green in the local water (on that day at, that depth)

The visability has been too awful lately for me to shoot a blue card. and half my dives are at night so I've just not had the chance. But I'd like to collect a small notebook of "bluecards" that I could use for different condidtions.

Anyone see why this idea wouldn't work?

Much better to have a camera with W/B available as a housing control but those cameras are expensive.

One other use I have for shooting dive slates is that I should be able to measure the underwater light color by looking at the RGB pixel values in the still image. (the eye dropper tool in your photo editor should display RGB values) Then I can figure out what Kodak/Wraten CC filters would balance that light. Wratten CC filters are used in color darkroom work, comercial photography and in professional level cineography for color balance.

Okay, my Ikelite casing for the Sony HC40 has arrived. Problem now is I cannot set WB underwater since the the function is hidden in the touch screen menu. :11:

Will red filter and auto WB do? I have a grand total of two manual WB settings available

• Outdoor &
• Indoor
• Auto
• Spot

I think I bought the wrong camera.

 

[nshon]

I've been wanting to try this....
Get a blue card (easy to make if you have a color ink jet printer)

I was thinking about it but couldn't figure out the mechanics, thanks for the idea! It'll only be good for the depth that the photo is taken at though wouldn't it? Varying sunlight. It's still better than auto though. I also have in my collection a large collection of WB deficient photos so I'll give it a go next dive.

 

[Otter]

...Before you place the camera in the housing but after attaching any filter to the camera use the camera's manual white ballance feature on the LCD touch screen to set the white balance using the blue card.....

Why would you set the WB through the filter. I thought one of the objectives would be to remove the need for a filter by setting the WB. What am I missing?

 

[ronrosa]

Why would you set the WB through the filter. I thought one of the objectives would be to remove the need for a filter by setting the WB. What am I missing?

There are limitations on the amount of color correction that WB can do. For example, it can't turn black into white. The filter helps coloring both in auto and manual WB.

 

[ChrisA]

Why would you set the WB through the filter. I thought one of the objectives would be to remove the need for a filter by setting the WB. What am I missing?

Yes it might work without a filter but I think the camera's internal white balance has a limited range. It would be good it you _could_ loose the filter because they cut the light by about one stop. I think I could learn a lot by doing some simple experiments in my back yard like seeing if the camera will white ballance even with color corectn gell over the lens. With a set of CC filters I could measure the camera's ability to white ballance.