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Question: Looking through Flickr and other online galleries why do many digital photographers have white balance issues!?
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Because most people don't understand color temperature and white balance and use AWB most of the time, which is never percise and always a compromise!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Because digital photographers when they take a picture are recording the space and giving it a (dpi) pixel value!.Photographers who use film & darkroom (as I do) are actually recording the different shades of light, photography literally means "writing with light" !. As the light sensitive film is exposed it records the many beautiful shades and textures!. It is also more accurate to how the eye works!. The "True" blacks and whites in my opinion will never be as beautiful in digital as it is in film, no matter how many 1000's of dollars you spend on equipment!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Which white balance issues are you referring to!?

Outside of most, but not all advertising work, I am less interested in 'accurate' color than I am in the look of the image!. In fact, 'accurate' WB can ruin an image!. Try a sunset, or sunrise, with an 'accurate' WB sometime!.

I almost routinely shoot daylight with an 'overcast' white balance in much the same as I would have used a warming filter with film!. I am also not above using a totally inappropriate WB, like fluorescent, occasionally!. For some shots, I will filter a flash to correct it to tungsten in the foreground and have another flash unfiltered for the background/accent light!. Since I shoot mostly images with people in them, I correct the skin tone to look natural (unless I want a different look) and the devil can take the hindmost for the rest of the colors!.

I don't think as many digital photographers have WB problems as do film photographers for any skill level!. Really, how many film photographers actually know how to use color correction filters that aren't advanced amateurs or pros!? How many photos are there out there where someone was using the wrong color balance of film with no filter!? Auto WB is a great boon to photography in this regard!.

Flicker and other galleries that are wide open to anyone who wants to post their images is going to have a huge number of images with all sorts of problems, from composition to anything else you can think of!. If you went back to before digital capture and put up the film images across the spectrum of everyone who took pictures, you would see pretty much the same thing!.

It is the easy display of images that can create the impression that many digital photographers have a WB problem!. For one thing, many of the images you see aren't by 'photographers!.' They are by people who have digital cameras and take pictures!. Another thing is that many of the shots you see would have been in a drawer, scrapbook, shoe box, or somewhere else before sites like Flickr!. They would have only been seen by a few, like friends & relatives!. Most of us would only be seeing images from people who knew what they were doing because they would be the only ones with broad exposure!.

Vance

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I agree with Dale!.

But there're also the problems of
-- monitors that are not calibrated
-- a basic lack of understanding of what balanced color looks like
-- the inability to adjust density (using either Levels or Curves) before messing with brightness and contrast - which ALWAYS messes up white balance too!. And, of course !.!.!.
-- laziness!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

In my career, I spent 30 years trying to tell professional people about color temperatures!. It was tantamount to p ing up a wet rope!. I sold very technical projection equipment and a very sophisticated set of lenses, but most of the customers did not know how to tell those things from standard fare!. My customers were not, of course, physicists, so I found myself often casting pearls before swine!.

To give you an example, take an old projector with an incandescent lamp and project a photography a healthy, fair skinned, red headed girl!. Then take that same picture and project it with a Quartz Halogen lamp!. In picture one, she looks like she is; in picture two, she looks like a blue baby!.

How many photographers use filters on their cameras when shooting under florescent lamps!? Do they know why Harriet in accounting looks green!?Www@QuestionHome@Com