Hi,

Can some one wxplain the physical process of calabraiting white balance underwater using a late or grey card? I have read a lot about it but how do you do it???

How far away from the camera do you hold the slate etc? How long does it take?

Sorry if these seem silly questions!!

Ben

I set my white balance on Mark II usually on cloudy day , however is it is extremely bright i will use bright/sunny day hope that helps

-chris

Well to answer your questions rather than just give you some useless ranting here goes.

1) how close does the card have to be

The card should either fill the frame, focus is irrelevant. So long as the item you are white balancing from i.e. grey card, slate, hand, sand etc fills the majority of the cameras frame.

2) how long does it take.

depends on each camera, not long at all, maybe 30 seconds at the most ? Takes me about 10 seconds.

Try white balancing your camera on land ... point it at a white wall and go through the process to see how your camera does it. If you don’t know how read your manual.

PS if you are setting your white balance to take photos UW it can be done cloudy or sunny, same difference. Best results are always on sunny days as normal though.

I saw a well known underwater filmmaker with his fin painted white he said it was to set his whitebalance and I thought It was a great Idea. What do u guys think

not such a good idea, kinda geeky.

you’ll look silly, and lets face it the idea of diving is to look cool.

and white balance doesn’t work best with white, hence people use greay cards. The grey is a special colour made specifically for digital camera white balancing

there are actually some things to remember when using the white balance underwater.
nb
1. actually you should do the white balance every time when the light situation
changes (different depth, sun in background/foreground, shooting upwards or downwards)

2. As water absorbs the light of different wave length and this not only from the
surface to the bottom, but also from side to side, you need to hold the gray
slate at the same distance that your object is, that you want to photograph.
Sounds very difficult and isn’t achievable, but should actually done to receive
the best results. If you used a the white balance with the grey card closer that
the actual object is that your object will become more greenish. If your slate is
more far away as the object is the object will become more redish than it is.

3. If you are camera allowes shooting in raw, than use raw. You have far
more possibilities and control over the white balance in different raw file converters.

/lars

QUOTE you’ll look silly, and lets face it the idea of diving is to look cool.

Do u really love yourself or is it just for fun!!!!

I dont understand Yanky humer.....

I’m not a Yanky .. I am from England ...

if you’re shooting RAW, does it really make any difference?  i always have to adjust the RGB levels with or without custom white balance

if you’re using flash, then you’ll pretty much have daylight white balance

yes it does make sense in terms of speed of production. It follows the principle
try to get the best of a shot instantly. It’s is always better to get the shot right
away as it saves you a lot of time in post production.
The other thing is if you set the white balance manually you have another
option in the white balance menu from your favourite raw converter. I use
capture one and if I am using the manual white balance I just have another
option in the menu to decide which white balance I want to use, which in the
end may speed up my development process.

/lars

Hi Ben,

it’s been a while since we had this discussion.
How about sharing some of your results?

PS: You have a nice website!

Giles - 26 September 2006 01:42 AM

I’m not a Yanky .. I am from England ...

Nice one Giles, its like saying “I’m not foreign I’m British”

Ted