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Photo

D7500 (and my old D80) poor white balance

colours always seem off white balance kelvin settings

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#1
Deeeeps

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I went to the Registry Office yesterday to recce for my son's wedding.  I intend to shoot both video and stills in the room using the available light (some kind of diffused strip or LED strip lights plus a northwest facing window (wedding at 1115 - 1145.)

I took a large number of video clips using virtually all the settings of white balance on the camera, while the conditions remained the same.  I could not get the camera to display what the mark one eyeball could see.  Very frustrating, and same (of course) for stills.   I did experience this, shooting stills, with my old D80 and I was really hoping Nikon would have cured this.

 

I did a bit of research on the web and came up with an iphone app white balance meter, that shows the Kelvin temperature of the white the iphone 'sees.  I might add that taking photographs and videos with the iphone SE is a pleasure as the colours are beautiful.  If the iphone can do it,  why can't Nikon get past this?  Grrr!!

Anyway the iphone app is called Light Spectrum Pro.   I took the Kelvin reading and entered it into the manual menu on the D7500 and hey presto,  accurate reproduction of colours.

 

The rest of my family (all avid amateur photographers too)  have various Canon DSLRs and they don't have problems with white balance.   My first SLR was a Canon A-1 (1980) but I decided to go Nikon in 2006 with my first DSLR.   I wonder if that was a mistake.....

 

So I ask again:  if Apple can make their camera on all their 'i-gadgets'  do white balance, why can't the best camera manufacturer in the world do it??



#2
Merco_61

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Did you try doing a manual white balance? A gray card is the photographer's best friend in difficult light.

 

IME, Canon bodies don't work any better or worse than Nikons in difficult light, but the Auto WB can be quite pleasant in some situations, just like a Nikon.

 

If you shoot stills only, profiling the light with a ColorChecker and applying that profile in post is easy and gives even more precise results. There are ways to use a ColorChecker for video as well but I don't know how easy it is as I don't shoot video.



#3
Dogbytes

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I agree in that my iPhone SE is remarkably able in its ability to deal with anything from strip-lights to sunsets. However my D610, which has been on Auto White Balance for the entire five years I’ve owned it is similarly capable. If I find I need to, and that’s only for ‘artistic’ reasons, I may tweak the white balance in post.
The only time I ran into problems was in very mixed light (directional daylight and a lot of particularly unpleasant fluorescent tubes) at a very colourful wedding! In that particular case I just lit the critical shots with a flash fired through a white brolly. Nothing special and you can trigger it, in slave mode, with your camera’s built-in flash.

6450B199-C662-4041-BCB4-14B826106F1F.jpeg





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