Canon custom WB for welding glass.

[CaveDweller]

I know this has probably been covered loads of times but I'm still struggling. Basically I want a nice coloured picture after using welding glass instead of taking the easy way out and converting to B+W. Can anyone give me any advice on how to do most of the work in camera before using lightroom or point me towards any good tutorials? I'm using a 550D with Magic Lantern and a piece of shade 8 welding glass.

Cheers.

 

[Tringa]

With the welding glass on your camera go to live view.

Point the camera at a well illuminated white wall (ideally it should be similar illumination to that when taking the long exposure shots, but that is not always going to be possible). Don't do this early or late in the day to avoid a colour cast.

Initially the wall live view will look green but adjust the WB until it looks white, then save the white balance setting to use when you take shots with the welding glass.

Dave

 

[JennyGW]

With the welding glass on your camera go to live view.

Point the camera at a well illuminated white wall (ideally it should be similar illumination to that when taking the long exposure shots, but that is not always going to be possible). Don't do this early or late in the day to avoid a colour cast.

Initially the wall live view will look green but adjust the WB until it looks white, then save the white balance setting to use when you take shots with the welding glass.

Dave

Interesting. This works better than using a grey card in this situation?

 

[DazJW]

Just a heads up that if you're shooting in RAW and importing to Lightroom you'll need to correct the colour again in Lightroom because Adobe can't read all of whatever Canon does as part of custom white balances (at least with RAW files from my 40D) and the tint slider doesn't go far enough.

 

[Tringa]

I reckon almost any surface could be used to set the custom white balance. All your trying to do is using the live view to get the surface, the camera is pointing at, to look as it would do normally.

So in theory a blue wall could be used and the WB would be adjusted so it looks blue, rather than colour as seen through the welding glass, similarly with a grey card, even though a grey card normally has a different use.

I think it is easier to use a white wall as I think it is easier to spot slightly off white than trying to judge if a colour seen in live view is the same as the original.

Dave

 

[Alastair]

Make Lightroom do the work. Create a preset to apply the correction to the raw images. Lightroom has more options available for fine tuning the white balance.