Why do we white balance?

[Mike Veitch]

hahah..

nice one Bill

 

[nadwidny]

I don't white balance. Why? Because I want the resulting unlit image to more closely look like what a diver's eye will see. All those beautiful, white balanced videos give divers an unrealistic idea of what things will look like when they go down. ...

That's what I thought as well since I only shot in colder, darker, and I guess "greener" waters. The results were almost the same as what I saw with the naked eye. "Great. WB is for the anal"." I thought.

However this past winter, for the first time, I was shooting in warm water at recreational depths with ambient light (Cozumel was the location). Not my usual venue. I did my first dives without white balance as per my usual practice and since it was daytime, no lights. The results were terrible. Nothing but blues and browns and nothing like I saw with my eyes. So I did some while WBing using the sand at depth. Without a doubt the shots with WB are much more realistic to what I experienced than the shots without. I'm not sure what your experiences are with shooting in shallow, warm waters but I found that my shots were much worse by not using WB.

Given my results I would guess that WB is more important in the blue/warm water scenarios that most people dive in than the green/coldish waters that I'm used to. Whatever the reason, I've become more of a believer in WBing and I'm going to start to incorporate it into my shoots and see how it goes. I figure it isn't going to make the footage worse.

 

[PerroneFord]

As an exercise, I posted a sample on Vimeo of some color correction work that I did where the original footage was not white balanced.

Some of you may find it interesting to look at:

Color Correction Example on Vimeo

 

[robint]

I don't white balance. Why? Because I want the resulting unlit image to more closely look like what a diver's eye will see. All those beautiful, white balanced videos give divers an unrealistic idea of what things will look like when they go down. OK, so why don't I white balance really? Because my housing doesn't allow me to. Sniff.

ditto!

 

[Mike Veitch]

its alright, mwb doesn't work much past 60 ft anyway

 

[sea-mac]

If RAW capture is an option, is it recommended to forget about WB underwater and do the corrections during RAW conversion on the computer ?

 

[Papa_Bear]

If RAW capture is an option, is it recommended to forget about WB underwater and do the corrections during RAW conversion on the computer ?

In a video camera? Tell me more, I have not heard of it or the program that would read a RAW version (I assume uncompressed) of a AVI or HDV format?

 

[Papa_Bear]

As an exercise, I posted a sample on Vimeo of some color correction work that I did where the original footage was not white balanced.

Some of you may find it interesting to look at:

Color Correction Example on Vimeo

Very nice, but interesting considering you were using artificial light to start with! Halogen? It was blue light! Cave lights and not video lights? That would be interesting shooting different types of lighting! Thanks!

 

[PerroneFord]

Very nice, but interesting considering you were using artificial light to start with! Halogen? It was blue light! Cave lights and not video lights? That would be interesting shooting different types of lighting! Thanks!

I don't know what you mean here.

The cave lights were HID. The cavers' dive lights were a different color HID. Many cave lights are around 6500-6800k.

 

[PerroneFord]

In a video camera? Tell me more, I have not heard of it or the program that would read a RAW version (I assume uncompressed) of a AVI or HDV format?

There are a number of video cameras that can shoot RAW. But you can bet they are not doing it in HDV or AVI!