White balance has to do with matching the colour response of your editing software with the colour temperature of the dominant light source in your scene. You need to know that the usual light source suspects all give off light of different hues, based on their native colour temperature. For example:
tungsten (incandescent): 2800 degrees Kelvin cool white fluorescent: 5000K daylight, flash: 5500K overcast: 6500K and so on. The reason you have a number of choices of fluorescent is because there are so many different colour balanced fluorescents available (daylight, cool, warm). To set the white balance, which corrects for the colour temperature, you would find a neutral colour in the scene, like the white shirt of the boy on the right, and use the eyedropper tool in the Develop module. Just click on the neutral colour and the WB shifts immediately. What can throw off things is when you have two dominant light sources of differing colour temperatures. In your scene you have daylight from the windows and overhead fluorescent competing. But I think the fluorescents are likely "daylight balanced" so probably close enough to the window light so as not to matter too much. As the afternoon wears on though the daylight colour temp shifts and the issue becomes a bigger problem. In your version of Lightroom you can use the adjustment brush to paint in colour temperature shifts where needed or a gradient filter to cause a gradual shift over the scene. To make sure you have a neutral colour to sample you can being a good grey card along to shoot in the scene. The colour checker that Godfrey mentioned is the extra fancy version of that that allows very fine adjustments for the whole spectrum. Great for studio shooting (product and fashion) but overkill for most needs. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 6:19 AM, Eric Weir <eew...@bellsouth.net> wrote: > > I don’t understand what it is. I don’t understand how it works. In some cases > I don’t know how to get the results I want. > > This is an album of images taken mostly in a classroom, the same classroom, > the same day, over a period of about an hour and a half. > <https://www.flickr.com/photos/eeweir/13974421313/in/set-72157644174507442/> > As you can see, the coloring differs widely across the images. I tried to get > them to come out the same without success. > > Since posting these I’ve gone back to the images in LR and changed the WB > setting to auto and increased the exposure on a couple slightly. That gives > me the best most consistent results. But “auto” leaves me completely in the > dark. What could *I* have done to achieve the same results? > > While I’m at it, could someone please explain to me what the options under > the fluorescent setting—D, N, W, L—are? I don’t see that it makes any > difference what setting I use. And I generally don’t like the results I get > with any fluorescent setting. > > Thanks, > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Eric Weir > Decatur, GA USA > eew...@bellsouth.net > > "Our world is a human world." > > - Hilary Putnam > > > > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
