[Al_Kahollick]

Thanks everyone...I am still trying to get a decent shot. I am struggling to get the white balance correct. Once I think I have it dialed in I take another shot and it is off again. This may be a long learning curve.

An easy way to set the WB is to take a quick shot of the scene, then press the WB button to bring up the white balance setting control. Now you can scroll thru the options until you see what you want. Alternately, you can go directly to the WB menu and take a test shot by aiming at your subject and pressing the raw / fx button, you can then scroll thru the various settings. Hope this helps.

[patrick9]

An easy way to set the WB is to take a quick shot of the scene, then press the WB button to bring up the white balance setting control. Now you can scroll thru the options until you see what you want. Alternately, you can go directly to the WB menu and take a test shot by aiming at your subject and pressing the raw / fx button, you can then scroll thru the various settings. Hope this helps.

I LOVE that feature .I didn't have it on my DL. I find myself using it a bit on the K-30 when the WB seems a bit off. AWB is accurate most of the time tho

[Bagga_Txips]

If you have problems with post processing, try Faststone. It is free, gives you a nice clean interface by only showing options when you mouse to the edge of the shot, gives all you need in one place rather than a stack of menus, and works well with RAW. And did I mention that it is free?

[Chapchalk]

An easy way to set the WB is to take a quick shot of the scene, then press the WB button to bring up the white balance setting control. Now you can scroll thru the options until you see what you want. Alternately, you can go directly to the WB menu and take a test shot by aiming at your subject and pressing the raw / fx button, you can then scroll thru the various settings. Hope this helps.

Thanks this is what I had been doing but the colors still seem off and I really don't want to have to do that for ever photo. It has a lot more options than canon to correct but the canon when I switched the wb seemed more color accurate. I am looking thru pics posted on this site and they look great but I can't get anything close to them.

[Chapchalk]

If you have problems with post processing, try Faststone. It is free, gives you a nice clean interface by only showing options when you mouse to the edge of the shot, gives all you need in one place rather than a stack of menus, and works well with RAW. And did I mention that it is free?

Thank you I will have to look into that. I have photoshop elements but get lost in the stack of menus. I wish I had time to really devout to it.

[Chapchalk]

Is part of my issue because I am use to shooting in jpeg not raw?

[dcBear78]

Thank you I will have to look into that. I have photoshop elements but get lost in the stack of menus. I wish I had time to really devout to it.

Lightroom... Worth every cent.

[Heelers]

Do you notice the shake when you first turn the camera on? If so I don't think it's the lens shake reduction, I think what you are noticing is the sensor cleaning feature. It shakes the lo pass filter when you first turn the camera on to remove dust, you can go into your menu and disable it to see if that is the shake you refer to. It is very noticeable on my K-30.
I use a basic UV filter on my lenses,
Hope this helps.

[OldNoob]

It is possible to turn off the Dust Removal function or set it up to only come on when the camera is turned on or even when the camera is turned off. I believe My K-30 came with it set to run both when i turned it on and also when i turned it off.
This noise threw me also when i first got my camera. Currently I leave dust removal function off and occasionally run it.

[sterretje]

Thanks this is what I had been doing but the colors still seem off and I really don't want to have to do that for ever photo. It has a lot more options than canon to correct but the canon when I switched the wb seemed more color accurate. I am looking thru pics posted on this site and they look great but I can't get anything close to them.

Have you tried playing with the 'custom image' settings (page 155 of the english pdf manual).

Is part of my issue because I am use to shooting in jpeg not raw?

No.

[RGlasel]

I really don't want to have to do that for ever photo

Set it to AWB with the 4-way control on the back, and never change that setting again. Unless you are trying to achieve a specific effect with colour temperature, you don't even have to adjust the white balance later in another program like Photoshop.

I am looking thru pics posted on this site and they look great but I can't get anything close to them.

I have the same problem, but I'm pretty sure white balance isn't the cause! I hear you on the number of options with the K-30, I've had mine for 16 months and still don't know how to use half of them, but if you go with default settings you still have a very capable camera. Start out taking pictures in Auto mode and then come back here when the choices the camera makes don't give you what you are trying to capture. There is some high quality advice in this forum, but if you try to fix too many things at once, you will get so many different perspectives that it becomes very difficult to separate the truly helpful from the well-meaning, but misdirected help.

[Canada_Rockies]

The camera's auto white balance takes in the whole picture. This can result in a change in the white balance as the overall colour of the picture you are changing changes. Try the fixed white balance settings instead. Sunny, Cloudy, Shade, etc. This will make your balance the same on the whole series. It will also bring out your pictures with only minimal corrections needed, and you can apply the correction to the whole series in one go after you have fixed the first picture, in most software. If you are shooting JPEG, it is essential that you get the picture as good as possible in camera. There's a lot more wiggle room with RAW.

[RGlasel]

I don't want to beat a dead horse, but these two shots were taken when the sun was bright, but at a low angle and I was in a well-shaded location. I didn't have to adjust white balance or exposure, only applied a little bit of sharpening. I tried colour adjustments to make the greens look more yellow and fall-like, but I did such a poor job, I went back to the original camera settings. The actual scenes were too close to the colours you see here for what I wanted, but I couldn't wait for all the leaves to turn colour.

[normhead]

We do a lot of landscape and sunsets, most of our cameras have polarizing filters at all times, I guess it all depends on how you shoot. My wife and I shoot side by side, in some every tough conditions, so we understand completely why we use filters. We've seen plenty of with and without examples. The protection is an added bonus.

[Just1MoreDave]

Is part of my issue because I am use to shooting in jpeg not raw?

The camera has to choose a white balance to create the JPEG file. It's harder to fix it later because of that. The RAW files don't have a fixed white balance and can be changed later. The camera does add its white balance numbers to the file, the color temperature and tint, which are also used to create the preview you see on the camera LCD. But these numbers can be changed to something else.

You might try shooting RAW+JPEG for a while, maybe following suggestions here about setting the white balance in the camera. Then if you get a photo that looks wrong to you, you can open the RAW copy of the file in Photoshop Elements. The program will open Adobe Camera RAW first, and at the top of all the sliders are adjustments for the color temperature. There's an eyedropper tool (top bar, third tool from the left) if your photo has a spot that should be mostly white, gray or mostly black. The eyedropper will choose that spot and adjust the color channels to remove all color tint from that spot. You can move these sliders around and see if it fixes your color problem.

Perfect white balance is not necessary for every photo. I was just reading about the K-3's ability to have two white balances for one image, to harmonize images with multiple light sources. Then I saw this painting, which uses the contrast between light sources:



(That JPG is a really terrible reproduction but is not infringing on anyone's rights and it's good enough to make a point. The colors in the painting are much stronger.)