Do Canon white balance presents change tint?

[barnettgs]

Hello,

I was wondering that does any of Canon White Balance Presets (Daylight, Cloudly etrc) changes tint?

Unlike the K Colour Temperature?

[justadude]

To put the answer in as simple terms as possible, the answer is "Yes".  And to clarify, the only reason I am saying simple, is not meant to be insulting, but instead the opposite because I believe you are over thinking it.  

White balance affects the overall tone of a photo.  The tone consists of Temperature (blue to yellow) and Tint (green to magenta) which again, I am sure you know.  Using a in camera preset changes both of those.  The main reason is that the WB presets like daylight and cloudy are going to mostly move the temperature, while the WB presets tungsten and flourescent will mostly move the tint.  When you adjust only the K color on a grid, moving the point left to right adjusts the temperature, while moving the point up and down adjusts the tint.  Any of the in camera WB presets moves both of these.

So if you only want to adjust temperature, and not the tint, then use the k color grid in the WB settings instead of the WB presets.

I mostly know this due to the odd WB settings I need to adjust for my infrared photography at various wavelengths.

[barnettgs · Accepted solution]

Thanks, I have just done that and I could not tell the difference.  I guess custom K Colour temperature is for fine-tuning the white balance, such as using 5500K. 

The reason for this is because I have noticed a small shift in white balance, just walking dozens of metres further, etc. Also whichever direction I'm shooting against, against the light source, or sideways to it or behind it, despite using the same white balance preset. Which is why it has thrown me a bit.

Last question, sometimes I shoot in a quite dark condition at low ISO of 100, 125 etc before the winter sunrise or at the sunrise, and in the post procesing with RAW files, the shadow noise seems very excessive with lost details. Is that a normal behaviour with Canon's R6 II sensor?

[justadude]

"Last question, sometimes I shoot in a quite dark condition at low ISO of 100, 125 etc before the winter sunrise or at the sunrise, and in the post procesing with RAW files, the shadow noise seems very excessive with lost details. Is that a normal behaviour with Canon's R6 II sensor?"

that seems odd.  I have the same camera, as well as the R8 (same exact sensor in both).  For both of these cameras I can shoot at ISO 100 at times, but more often I am at ISO 1000 or 1600.  In my experience the noise is very low... low to the point of being better than with any other camera I have ever owned (and that's a lot).  

Can you upload an example?

[johnrmoyer]

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@barnettgs wrote:

Last question, sometimes I shoot in a quite dark condition at low ISO of 100, 125 etc before the winter sunrise or at the sunrise, and in the post procesing with RAW files, the shadow noise seems very excessive with lost details. Is that a normal behaviour with Canon's R6 II sensor?

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Some camera settings will change shadow noise. For example, the manual for my EOS R5 says:

• Long bulb exposure will increase noise, but does not say whether that is thermal photon noise or visible light photon noise.
• High speed shooting will increase noise if RAW instead of CRAW making me think that CRAW does some smoothing before compression. CRAW noise seems less like film grain to me than RAW noise.
• High camera temperature increases noise
• Auto lighting optimizer may increase noise
• Highlight tone priority may increase noise
• Unsharp mask with a low threshold and small radius may sharpen noise
• Peripheral illumination correction may increase noise
• Sometimes digital lens optimizer may make noise more prominent
• diffraction correction may sharpen noise

Of those in the above list, when any of the exposure elements are auto, it seems to me that auto lighting optimizer, peripheral illumination correction, and highlight tone priority may change the exposure so that noise is increased in the raw file so I turn them off if I plan to edit the raw file. The others do not change the raw file.

[barnettgs]

Default JEPG

This is a default JPG with exposure of -1 to preserve the sky details.

For some reason, this won't let me upload the RAW so I have put it in Google Drive link - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GIMFljwdkE181NZC8BmLSXtQ4SmELC_o/view?usp=sharing

Try to brighten up the bottom half and you will see what I mean.

[LeeP]

I cannot tell you how many times I forget to set white balance specifically. 

[johnrmoyer]

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@barnettgs wrote:

This is a default JPG with exposure of -1 to preserve the sky details.

For some reason, this won't let me upload the RAW so I have put it in Google Drive link - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GIMFljwdkE181NZC8BmLSXtQ4SmELC_o/view?usp=sharing

Try to brighten up the bottom half and you will see what I mean.

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I hope some of this might be helpful.

In the metadata, I noticed "[MakerNotes:Camera] PeripheralLightingSetting : On". I turned it off in DPP and this is the bottom right corner after brightening at 400% and I do not notice much noise:

This is one of the trees at 400%: 

[barnettgs]

Thank you, I guess that is normal with Canon R6 II sensor.  It is just the Lightroom CC that made the RAW files look worse.

I think I have come to the conclusion that my EVF is cooler than the rear screen. The images on my computer/mobile phone are much closer to the screen. So I have just adjusted the EVF fine-tuning colour tone to +2 to the right to match the image output, especially for when viewing the playback images.

Hopefully that should help me to evaluate the white balance better on the EVF.

[justadude]

John came to the same conclusions that I did, but he provided you with a lot more info than I would have with the screenshots (thanks, John!).  I opened it in both DPP4 and in Adobe Canon RAW.  I had a bit better luck with DPP4, even though the program is slooooow.  

The one thing I would add is that you are opening up a LOT of shadow area, which with this amount, really increases the look of the noise in programs like Lightroom or Camera Raw - but it shows less in DPP4.  If when shooting you set your exposure to open these up more in the histogram on your camera you would have a lot less noise.  I do a lot of nighttime cityscapes, and night sky photography.  While my histogram is often way to the left on these shots, I try to get just a small amount of light (detail) into the shadows if possible.  But, that is not always possible.  However on shots like the one you shared, I would have upped the exposure a bit more after a first test shot, which would have brought a bit of detail to the dark areas before editing.  Then there would be a cleaner image once you do edit.

But to give you a better idea on what to expect with noise with the R6 Mk ll, this image was a first test shot for the night, so it was before I brought my exposure up quite a bit.  The reason I am posting it is so that you can see how little noise there is at ISO 3200 in the very dark areas on this camera.  Sure, the noise is visible, but far less than my older Canon and Pentax cameras show.  But ignore the preview Dropbox shows which for some reason looks super bright - brighter than you would ever edit a photo like this.  The download should be the unedited RAW file.

Anyway, have a peek here...   https://www.dropbox.com/K62A9911.CR3 

[justadude]

"I cannot tell you how many times I forget to set white balance specifically."


For 95% of my work I shoot RAW, so Auto WB works perfectly fine.  But when I have to shoot in jpeg only mode, such as for an event where the organizers expect a few thousand photos turned over next day, and only want to make small prints with them, then I need a custom WB.  I often forget to set the jpeg WB until maybe 100-200 shots into the event.  Whoops!  Guess I'll be doing extra editing on those first shots - lol.