[K-Three]

stick to the use of AWB and rely on post processing to tweak my photos

AWB & RAW together please,
If you are shooting jpgs, in tricky lighting, there is some value to setting a specific WB, though for most work, especially in outdoors, daylit, I've found AWB does pretty well

[psoo]

AWB & RAW together please,
If you are shooting jpgs, in tricky lighting, there is some value to setting a specific WB, though for most work, especially in outdoors, daylit, I've found AWB does pretty well

Hi K-Three. Yes I've been using RAW exclusively over the last few years. So, yes, it's RAW plus AWB all the way.

[psoo]

Another thought I have about AWB is that when I use my K50 with my DA 18-135 lens, I find that using AWB in the shade and indoors tends to yield overly blue photos. Correcting to a more balanced image by post-processing is often unsatisfactory. However, I find that shots taken on my $125 Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot camera and my wife's simple point-and-shoot yield nicely balanced color. If I want good color balance indoors or in shady outdoor areas I usually have to use flash. I wonder why a relatively sophisticated camera such as the K50 gives poor AWB in shady areas and indoors. Comments?

[Fogel70]

Another thought I have about AWB is that when I use my K50 with my DA 18-135 lens, I find that using AWB in the shade and indoors tends to yield overly blue photos. Correcting to a more balanced image by post-processing is often unsatisfactory. However, I find that shots taken on my $125 Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot camera and my wife's simple point-and-shoot yield nicely balanced color. If I want good color balance indoors or in shady outdoor areas I usually have to use flash. I wonder why a relatively sophisticated camera such as the K50 gives poor AWB in shady areas and indoors. Comments?

On most Pentax DSLR it is possible to fine tune AWB, so you may need to tweak it. Or you may have accidently messed with AWB settings, FI while trying to select focus point.
It may also depend on custom image (color profile) setting have you choosen, and if have you done any manual tweaking to it.

[stevebrot]

Another thought I have about AWB is that when I use my K50 with my DA 18-135 lens, I find that using AWB in the shade and indoors tends to yield overly blue photos. Correcting to a more balanced image by post-processing is often unsatisfactory. However, I find that shots taken on my $125 Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot camera and my wife's simple point-and-shoot yield nicely balanced color. If I want good color balance indoors or in shady outdoor areas I usually have to use flash. I wonder why a relatively sophisticated camera such as the K50 gives poor AWB in shady areas and indoors. Comments?

It may have something to do with the light within the scene and, if shooting RAW, what software is being used for processing. AWB is determined, post-exposure, from the actual RGB capture data and may produce bluish result if the shade is dappled or if the frame includes areas of both open shade (essentially sky-lit) and full-sun. On the RAW processing side, not all processing software uses the WB settings provided by the camera and some may add tonal flavor of their own (beware custom camera profiles).

As for unsatisfactory results in post processing, that does not surprise me and the reason has nothing to do with white balance. The light in open shady is deficient in warm tones. Without a specific example, it is hard to say how to remedy or what role your RAW processing tool choice may play.

In regards to your wife's Coolpix providing superior color balance, you may want to do a head-to-head comparison for out-of-camera JPEG (identical framing and light) with your K-50 in green mode (will apply auto-scene and turn your camera into a P&S).


Steve

[Alex645]

K50 with my DA 18-135 lens, I find that using AWB in the shade and indoors tends to yield overly blue photos. However, I find that shots taken on my $125 Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot camera and my wife's simple point-and-shoot yield nicely balanced color. I wonder why a relatively sophisticated camera such as the K50 gives poor AWB in shady areas and indoors. Comments?

Although I usually shoot RAW, I haven't noticed this problem with AWB jpegs in the shade on a K-50. I suspect there is some setting in your menu that is creating that cool bias.

As the OP, please post some examples with the metadata from both your K50 and the Nikon Coolpix in the shade so we can help identify the cause. What you described is not 'normal'.

[psoo]

Hi Alex, I have attached some photos taken with my K50. They were taken in RAW but the photos files say jpeg. Don't know what this means. Note the bluish tint that couldn't be removed during post processing on my Mac using the Apple software "Photos". The camera was set to AWB and the "Custom Image" setting on the camera that I selected was "Natural". A few later photos were taken with the custom image selected as "Bright". The photos were brighter but still blue. What am I doing wrong?

---------- Post added 08-23-19 at 04:55 PM ----------

I forgot to mention that the photos were taken in the late afternoon in August, very close to a beach on Long Island, NY, under a relatively blue hazy sky.

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[Alex645]

Hi Alex, I have attached some photos taken with my K50. They were taken in RAW but the photos files say jpeg. Don't know what this means. Note the bluish tint that couldn't be removed during post processing on my Mac using the Apple software "Photos". The camera was set to AWB and the "Custom Image" setting on the camera that I selected was "Natural". A few later photos were taken with the custom image selected as "Bright". The photos were brighter but still blue. What am I doing wrong?[COLOR="Silver"]

a) A few years back, Apple's Photos only worked with jpegs, but I just tested opening a DNG on Photos (version 2.0, circa 2016), and it worked fine without any WB anomalies.
What version of Photos are you running, and did you shoot your RAW as a DNG or PEF? Maybe that's a factor. Personally I use Photoshop, Lightroom, or Nik because I find Photos too limiting. Fine for my phone, but that's about it.

b) Your metadata says your white balance was set on manual. So the Custom Image setting may have over-ruled your AWB setting somehow and skewed the color balance. Try to not use a Custom Image setting and make sure you do have it set to AWB.

c) Photos doesn't have any color balance correction settings and at best for this situation, allow you to make it monochrome. Below I've adjusted the color balance on Photoshop CC. It was mostly too cyan and needed red.

[Fogel70]

Shooting images with icorrect set WB will happen to all of us from time to time.
But I found a remedy for it.

One thing I always do on my Pentax cameras is in the memory section I disable memory on WB.
So every time i switch on my camera it switch to AWB, no matter what WB I used last time.

I also do the same on exposure compensation and ISO.
It is just much more convinient to let the camera reset these settings automatically, than having to remember to check/reset them manually at each power on.

[psoo]

a) A few years back, Apple's Photos only worked with jpegs, but I just tested opening a DNG on Photos (version 2.0, circa 2016), and it worked fine without any WB anomalies.
What version of Photos are you running, and did you shoot your RAW as a DNG or PEF? Maybe that's a factor. Personally I use Photoshop, Lightroom, or Nik because I find Photos too limiting. Fine for my phone, but that's about it.

b) Your metadata says your white balance was set on manual. So the Custom Image setting may have over-ruled your AWB setting somehow and skewed the color balance. Try to not use a Custom Image setting and make sure you do have it set to AWB.

c) Photos doesn't have any color balance correction settings and at best for this situation, allow you to make it monochrome. Below I've adjusted the color balance on Photoshop CC. It was mostly too cyan and needed red.

Hi Alex, thanks for tweaking my photo. You've got a much better color rendition than mine. My version of Photos is 1.5 dated 2015. I guess this should be undated to the latest version. This may be a root cause of my poor color tints. Thanks.

---------- Post added 08-24-19 at 09:00 PM ----------

As I said previously in my post, I use RAW and set my camera to AWB. I do not scroll and select Daylight, Cloudy, Shady, etc. I thought that this was not necessary if I selected AWB. Doesn't AWB measure the lighting condition and AUTOMATICALLY select the optimum lighting condition for me? Are you saying that I SHOULD select the individual lighting condition and not AWB? If this is the best way to get an accurate color rendition for my photos, what does AWB do for me?

[stevebrot]

Doesn't AWB measure the lighting condition and AUTOMATICALLY select the optimum lighting condition for me? Are you saying that I SHOULD select the individual lighting condition and not AWB? If this is the best way to get an accurate color rendition for my photos, what does AWB do for me?

Technically WB does not apply to RAW capture, though the settings from the camera are saved in the makernotes section of the EXIF metadata of PEF/DNG file. Many RAW processing products (e.g. Pentax DCU, Adobe Lightroom, ACR, and others) will use the numbers from the EXIF, while others evaluate or apply WB using other methods. I suspect that is what happened to your blue photos.*

Yes, you can override AWB at capture time, but usually there is no need or advantage in doing so and in practice can be quite cumbersome, particularly if the custom manual setting is accidentally used for for different light. My practice is to use the camera's AWB setting as interpreted by Lightroom and tweak as needed during post-processing; though there is seldom a need to do so. Pentax AWB is usually fairly effective.


Steve

* There are other possibilities as well, including inadvertent changing WB by bumping the 4-way controller with the base of one's thumb. It is amazing how easily one can go from AWB to 2500K.

[Alex645]

Hi Alex, thanks for tweaking my photo. You've got a much better color rendition than mine. My version of Photos is 1.5 dated 2015. I guess this should be undated to the latest version. This may be a root cause of my poor color tints. Thanks.

---------- Post added 08-24-19 at 09:00 PM ----------

As I said previously in my post, I use RAW and set my camera to AWB. I do not scroll and select Daylight, Cloudy, Shady, etc. I thought that this was not necessary if I selected AWB. Doesn't AWB measure the lighting condition and AUTOMATICALLY select the optimum lighting condition for me? Are you saying that I SHOULD select the individual lighting condition and not AWB? If this is the best way to get an accurate color rendition for my photos, what does AWB do for me?

Earlier versions of Photos would convert all RAW files automatically to jpeg, so updating your Mac OS might help.

As others have stated, RAW is not affected by white balance settings, so what you're seeing is definitely a jpeg issue.

You are right, if you set it to AWB, it should automatically give you a decent color balance. 99% of the time it's operator error and 1% of the time it's the camera. But just as an experiment, run a manual test in daylight but compare results with AWB vs. Daylight vs. other WB settings to see what's going on.

Another suggestion might be to look at Pentax Forum members map and see if there is a member close to you and send them a message asking if they'd be willing to meet up and check out your camera settings.

[vonBaloney]

Yes, you can override AWB at capture time, but usually there is no need or advantage in doing so...

Except for CTE, which gives you information in your RAW file that is otherwise lost. I feel like I can always "auto" it later easy enough.

[stevebrot]

Except for CTE, which gives you information in your RAW file that is otherwise lost. I feel like I can always "auto" it later easy enough.

My understanding is that CTE (Color Temperature Enhancement) is just a tweak to AWB with a bias towards the dominant color rather than correcting such as a color cast, such that the golden hour still looks golden and the blue hour still looks blue and rain forests still look verdant. One can accomplish much the same by setting WB to "daylight" or 5200K. In all cases the capture data in the RAW remains the same and all that changes are the WB data in the makernotes.

That being said, your point is well taken in that it is not unusual to get home from a "golden hour" session only to find that it looks more like the plain white hour when reviewing the images later.


Steve

[Fogel70]

Hi Alex, thanks for tweaking my photo. You've got a much better color rendition than mine. My version of Photos is 1.5 dated 2015. I guess this should be undated to the latest version. This may be a root cause of my poor color tints. Thanks.

---------- Post added 08-24-19 at 09:00 PM ----------

As I said previously in my post, I use RAW and set my camera to AWB. I do not scroll and select Daylight, Cloudy, Shady, etc. I thought that this was not necessary if I selected AWB. Doesn't AWB measure the lighting condition and AUTOMATICALLY select the optimum lighting condition for me? Are you saying that I SHOULD select the individual lighting condition and not AWB? If this is the best way to get an accurate color rendition for my photos, what does AWB do for me?

Have you tried shooting jpg in AWB (or RAW+ that shoot both RAW and jpg)? If the jpg straight out of camera looks fine, then it is definitely something that goes wrong with the RAW developer.
If camera jpgs have the same color tint, then it is something in the camera not correctly set up.