White Balance: False reality?

ukaskew

ukaskew

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There is often quite a debate around processing, displaying a realistic portrayal of a scene etc, but why does this almost never apply to white balance?

Whilst it's slowly changing, most urban areas in the UK are bathed in an orange glow at night, yet almost all urban night photography is 'corrected' as if street lighting is white.

At a wedding how often does the brides dress actually look white when indoors? Many venues have a variety of light sources and if we were to refelect reality it would often be anything but white.

Some recent D850 high ISO images appeared from a concert, they were quite purple and presumably this was a fairly accurate record of the scene, yet they got a lot of flack for looking purple.

I'm not saying it's wrong, just intrigued as to why it's (always been?) an accepted change to recording the scene as we've seen it, when so many other edits/adjustments are frowned upon if they are changed in certain circumstances.
 
The subtle difference is that, with regard to white balance, the sensor can record the scene differently to how you "see" it. Your brain corrects the white balance imbalance caused by changing colour temperatures.
So it's the reality of what you see that is false.
But yes, I get your point.
 
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I think it's a fascinating subject actually - colour perception is a very individual thing, yet we strive for some perfect standard that really doesn't exist, at best it's a approximation.

The situation is somewhat extreme in our house - two of our three boys are colour blind (although not the same interestingly), but it's always given me case to think about what I can realistically expect to achieve by tweaking things like WB, so tend not to get overly fixated on things like that anymore. Even if there is a 'normal' ratio of Red / Green / Blue cones for us trichromats,there's also a variation around that norm as you would expect, and that's even before you let the brain start messing things up further (remember that dress!).

I suppose the raw camera data is the most accurate representation (as in its common across multiple individuals, although difference sensor designs compromise this, as do the optical transmission qualities of the lens etc), and all our tweaks are to pull what was captured by the camera, modified by the display technology we are using, closer to something that our unique eyes captures and that was then muddled a little further by our individual and again unique brains!

I guess I don't know either!
 
Sometimes a "wrong" white balance can make a picture more beautiful. You can go for accuracy, or your version of it, or you can just do what looks best.
 
Graham W said:
The subtle difference is that, with regard to white balance, the sensor can record the scene differently to how you "see" it. Your brain corrects the white balance imbalance caused by changing colour temperatures.
So it's the reality of what you see that is false.
But yes, I get your point.
Click to expand...

True, but I was thinking more of really obvious situations rather than subtle differences, such as street lighting. More often than not when critiquing people will call out an urban night scene left in its more natural orangey state and suggest it should be adjusted to appear as though the light was white or even slightly blue.

Yet, of course, that would be entirely unnatural and nothing like how the vast majority of us see it. In fact a quick Flickr search of UK urban night photography brings up pages of images which when you think about it are largely unrecognisable to how we see those scenes. If nothing else historically we will have a 'false' record of how things were.
 
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It's more about psychology than what's held to be right or wrong. Also, looking at a photograph is a circumstance different from being in and looking at the real world - it's an extract in a frame that focusses our attention.
 
Graham W said:
Your brain…
Click to expand...


REALITY
WB may be technically well achieved simply by
using a grey card — as you know. Most image
makers will add, to the rendition of that reality, a
touch of artistic intent — which is legitimate.


THE VISUAL PERCEPTION
Graham W is right to evoke the HEAVY partici-
pation of the brain in the "perception" of visual
stimuli… unmistakably!

Somewhere between the two, there is a very wide
spectrum of "acceptable and pleasant" renditions
and, of course, their opposite. :cool:
 
I think the main problem is the use of WB. If everything is bathed in an orange light, paying attention to something that looks neutral at the time would be where you should be picking your WB from rather than something that should be neutral. Areas shaded from the lighting would be a food place to look for these areas.
 
It's all to do with expectations, sometimes meeting expectations is more important than representing reality as noone will believe the reality you represent. Other times showing the reality and resetting expectations is the beauty of the image.

But with things like wedding photos people have expectations, you can play it safe and meet them, or take a risk and try to push the boundaries.
 
mjmountain said:
sometimes meeting expectations is more important than representing reality
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Well said… and explains the important role
of the brain in the equation.
 
We wouldn't need to have auto white balance in the camera if we didn't have auto white balance operating in our brains. The goal of auto white balance is to produce an image which when looked at under eyes adapted to "normal" lighting looks like what our eye and brain's auto white balance would have seen at the time and place of the photograph. Rather like autoexposure and autofocus it doesn't always get it right.
 
ukaskew said:
True, but I was thinking more of really obvious situations rather than subtle differences, such as street lighting. More often than not when critiquing people will call out an urban night scene left in its more natural orangey state and suggest it should be adjusted to appear as though the light was white or even slightly blue.

Yet, of course, that would be entirely unnatural and nothing like how the vast majority of us see it. In fact a quick Flickr search of UK urban night photography brings up pages of images which when you think about it are largely unrecognisable to how we see those scenes. If nothing else historically we will have a 'false' record of how things were.
Click to expand...
But our eyes aren't seeing the orange lit streets anywhere near as orange as they actually are.

Go outside, set your camera WB to 'daylight' and shoot an image; does that look like what your eyes are 'seeing'?

So what is 'real'? Our eyes fool us all the time.

As photographers, our job is to create an image that fits our vision, as soon as we point a camera at something, we've edited out part of the scene, when we change focal length we choose the relationship between objects left in the frame, with focus, DoF and composition we choose what we think is important to the viewer.

WB is a very small part of the 'false' image we created.
 
As has been said above WB is what we perceive it to be, or how we wish to show it

I had a chuckle to myself many years ago when I was duped into buying an Expodisc to ensure I was recording an accurate WB, then a year or so later Expodisc launched a 'warmer' version as too many weren't happy with the 'accurate' rendition and like to up the WB a bit lol

So the best answer is that the WB is correct when you (or your client) are happy with it :)

Dave
 
I'm not really a fan of adjusting white balance so photos i take under incandescent light look quite yellow - perhaps not to everyone's taste but for me it makes the photos seem nearer to what i actually saw.
 
boliston said:
I'm not really a fan of adjusting white balance so photos i take under incandescent light look quite yellow - perhaps not to everyone's taste but for me it makes the photos seem nearer to what i actually saw.
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But the camera has already had a go.

If you want the camera to record what's actually there, you have to set daylight WB then you'll be recording 'reality', and the warm tungsten isn't the worst thing, sodium lights and fluorescent look awful.

But like you, I leave some 'warmth' when shooting under tungsten because that gives a feel of the atmosphere that existed.
 
Phil V said:
But our eyes aren't seeing the orange lit streets anywhere near as orange as they actually are.
Click to expand...

Our brains always 'correct' white balance for us.

Car windows these days mostly have a slight green/blue tint. Yet when we drive along all the colours of the world look to be true. Until we look through an open window and the world takes on a magenta hue. This is most noticeable if a window is wound half way down after you've been driving for a while.:)
 
I thought about this a while back when I started dipping my toes into photography. The main thing for me was white balance and portraying it accurately. A sodium streetlight will be orange-amber in colour. Hence white will look orange-amber. If I adjusted WB so white was white, it wouldn't recreate the natural orange glow.

In the end, I decided to focus on my interpretation of the scene, rather than what I saw or what was there. A bit like how two artists might draw the same scene - they may use different materials, draw in different styles and accentuate different areas - with the result of two different drawings, and neither a facsimile of the scene itself.
 
The camera sensor sees colour temperature different to the human eye, so a lot of correction is to normalise it. For example, shoot under fluorescent light and you'll get a green hue to everything. Some is done deliberately of course to make it more pleasing depending on the colour temp.
 
Shoot in candle light and then adjust the white balance so that a white object is white - it just looks wrong, it is not what is expected.
 
Suvv said:
Shoot in candle light and then adjust the white balance so that a white object is white - it just looks wrong, it is not what is expected.
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And if you fix the WB to daylight, it looks horrid.
We know it should be 'warm' but we don't want to see a picture of what it actually looks like ;)
 
Orangecroc said:
A case in point.

https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/cows-by-the-path.662224/#post-7939819

Daniel asked where I took the white balance from, and it was from the only white in the scene and still appears slightly yellow. However, when I took the shot, the light did give the scene a warm glow the way it shows in the picture despite the WB looking off.
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I'm not saying there's anything 'wrong', the windows are in shade and the scene appears to have a nice warm evening light generally.

If you'd taken a wb reading near the cows you'd have lost the warmth; but would that be 'right'? I'd say no. It's closer to natural the way it is.
 
Orangecroc said:
it was from the only white in the scene and still appears slightly yellow.
Click to expand...


Right Ben, one reads a white point in the shade
to preserve the warm tones and in the sunlight
to cancel them.

Your take appears on the yellow side but maybe
it was like that… I wasn't there. So it is up to you
to decide. :cool:
 
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