[IchabodCrane]

Yes, I know the old adage about when shooting RAW, white balance doesn't matter. I'd like to try a little harder up front and not leave everything to PP.

When dealing with multiple colored lights, many of them LEDs, is it best to fix WB on a certain K or do something else like just use AWB (or another preset)? I'm inclined not to use AWB because the camera then tries to compensate every time the light changes which seems counter to the whole idea of colored lights. OTOH, our eyes don't perceive color as it really is so maybe a manually set WB isn't a good approach. Any experiences and comments? Thanks.

[RockvilleBob]

Good question. My choice would be white balance on auto with PP for keeper shots
A quick Google search yields these:
Concert Photography: Choosing the Best Camera Settings - Digital Photography School
also
5 Essential Concert Photography Tips

[LensBeginner]

It's actually not true that WB doesn't matter with RAW.
I does matter when you're dealing with multiple light sources (i.e. flash photography), because changing the WB of those independently becomes a mess.

As far as flash photography is concerned, you can use gels and filters.
When you're doing concert photography however you have no control on lighting (save for flash, if you use it).
So just use whatever WB you think appropriate and just play with it in post, choosing on a case-by-case basis when to, e.g., aim for the best skintones for the main subject or let the colors of the light play their game or whatever strikes your fancy/taste.

[MadMathMind]

If the lights change color during the show, there's not much you can do--you can have it right for a few seconds, but then it will be wrong again. In fact, you may be WAY off if you stick with this approach. At least in auto, the camera will try to get something close. If you set balance for purple and it changes to orange, you're going to spend a lot more time correcting the one wrong image than you would have spent tuning both from auto.

You can try to set a manual color temperature. You're going to be purely guessing, however, since I don't think you're going to have access to the show and its lightning before the event. The colors are not going to come out right out of the camera. There's not much you can do about it.

As for keeping colored lights...that's up to you. They are part of the show, but the won't be captured on camera like your eyes seem them.

[owl]

Automatic, I just shot The Nutcracker last night and found that auto worked best, I also used -1.7EV, ISO3200 with the K3 and f/2.8 or a little higher with the FA43. The 43 perfectly cropped the scene and the 24MP gave enough resolution for isolating a subject; shutter speeds were as high as 1/1000. Make sure that you turn all sounds and lights off. Put a piece of tape over the memory access indicator light and use your viewfinder to avoid annoying anyone behind you.

[owl]

Here's another.

[Flugelbinder]

If - and for what I understand, they pretty much are - the stage lights are balanced, they should be towards daylight warmth, so, if you set your WB to daylight (and spot meter) the skin tones should be close to reality, while keeping all the other colors also well reproduced. Still have to try the Pentax under these circumstances though...

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Last edited by Flugelbinder; 12-14-2014 at 09:11 PM.

[DeadJohn]

Try DNG+JPG and auto WB. That gives you the best of both worlds: potentially usable JPGs with no processing and raw files when you want to enhance your best shots.

For stage photography you are dealing with colored LEDs plus low light. You need a fast shutter speed to freeze action which often requires ISO to be so high that color response suffers. JPG might get you usable shots for screen display, but if you ever get a shot that you want to crop, print large, or simply get better color then you will regret not having a DNG file to process.

[rawr]

If you are shooting bands, get some duct tape that is close to 18% grey and tape it on the lead singer's microphone, use AWB, shoot RAW, then use the WB dropper in Lightroom or DxO etc to read the grey swatch off the microphone to fine tune WB.

That's how I dream of doing it, at least. Sometimes it works by accident if the microphone has a grey base.

In practice, if I can, wherever possible at a gig or event I take a grey card along and shoot it under areas illuminated by the main lighting banks to get a few WB samples, then I set AWB, set RAW, and shoot away. In post-processing if the colours look wrong I then hunt around the image with the WB dropper to see if there is something close to grey that I can use to colour correct from, or I will use my WB sample images as a colour temperature adjustment reference.

[eddie1960]

LED is the biggest PITA, particularly when the guy at the board decidered looks good because then you have 1 channel of colour and the worst one at that (purple is nasty too)
If you are lucky someone in the band is wearing white or a neutral close to 18% grey, if not look for an item that will be 18%.
you want the colour in any case so over corecting the wb can lose the drama of the light. a lot of older lighting setups are easy just adjust for tungsten since that is the base for the spot. If you use a flash in that case to bring up the light levels then make sure you drop the tungsten stofen on the flash (or any other correction gell appropriate to the light source)

[DeadJohn]

There's no rule that says all photos have to simulate natural daylight colors. It's not mandatory to "undo" the effect of colored lights. If the performers' skin is an unnatural color that's tough to fix then make that effect work for you and leave it in the final photo. IMO, go with either really strong colors or natural skin tones because a slight trace of colored lights on skin can make people look sickly.

Tangent alert: This reminds me of a story I heard about the original 1960s Star Trek series. Green makeup was used to make [alien] look more alien. They sent test images to the photo lab to see how it looked on film. The images came back and [someone] said "not green enough" to the makeup artists. They added more green and sent another test photo to the photo lab. After a few rounds of this, the team learned the photo lab was color correcting the test images to get natural skin tones. Depending on who is telling the story, the [alien] is either Spock or an Orion woman, [someone] ranges from Gene Roddenberry to unnamed production assistants.

[dms]

As a starting point I generally start with a color temperature of about 2300K--but this is for two theaters I normally work in and is more often straight theater, and occasionally dance. Then looking at the shots in Raw I pick a gray or white area (e.g., if need be even a person's eye) in the more important area, but you may want to not go all the way to correcting it. (Frankly I think it does not matter what the initial WB setting is--anyway not until you get some experience with a particular venue--either tungsten [3200K], 2300K, or AWB are reasonable starting points.)

I do mostly theater so I want a relatively "realistic" picture as regards skin tones, but for concert/etc. the impression of the colors likely should be what the artists were trying to convey. But not trying to do some correcting may be too odd (the way we see it and how it photographs are generally very different--the more so as it diverges further from realism), and as a starting point you might try roughly midway between tungsten light setting and the realistic WB gotten by sampling a white/gray area.

But as DeadJohn points out--you may not be able to get the skin tones to look natural, and very unnatural can be better than a sickly yellowish green, and with mixed lighting there may only be a small slice of the scene where you choose to get a natural look--and elsewhere it may be look awful. Even considering only the lighting many of the shots may simply not be usable--so you want to take a lot!

Incidentally (to the OP) your views seem to be right on--so I don't think you need much guidance. Frankly it is always somewhat of a surprise, you would think it would become "old hat" but for me it never is.

[c.a.m]

Just to note that the camera's AWB function seems to be designed to cover a range of colour temperatures. For example, my K-5 ii operating manual indicates that AWB works in the 4000-8000 K range. I assume that outside of this range, the AWB may or may not determine the colour temp correctly; for these lower or higher temps, a manual WB setting might be more suitable.

- Craig

[dms]

My K-5 using AWB does a good job of setting WB for typical incandescent lighting--i.e., temperatures well below 4000K. Easy to check just shoot a regular incandescent light bulb.

[wildman]

when shooting RAW, white balance doesn't matter.

Yep - set it to AWB, fire away, bring it into PS and make it look the way you want it to look...