Does “One touch white balance” really works as its name implies?

[Growltiger]

Sorry to revive an old thread, but does in camera custom white balance ever work to begin with???? Or is that just to get you close enough to the ballpark and then you tweak in post?
I bought an x-rite colorchecker passport just for that (coz I felt cheaper chinese knock offs were inacurate) and even when I set a custom white balance in camera using the WB target, whenever I go into Camera Raw there still is a shift when I click on WB over the grey area, it's very confusing and frustrating not knowing which is the correct one. I am lately using the panasonic LX100, but I think I had the same issue with the OMD EM5 as well. Any ideas ????

The Camera Raw result depends on the Camera profile being used. Camera Raw uses the profile to decode the raw file.
If you want perfection you need to use the X-Rite Colorchecker and create a camera profile. But that is more work for a small gain. This is what a pro would do when doing an outdoor shoot, and might make several profiles as the light changes.

 

[Mack]

Imho, ALL RAW converters will differ in what their settings will be. I've had some where the color will be 1,000K different from others, as well as the green/magenta tints that differ too on same image. Maddening really. There's even talk on the Adobe forums about Adobe applying some magic boost to the mid-tones too if you look. FastRawViewer can force Adobe to render tones accurately here: https://www.fastrawviewer.com/blog/FastRawViewer-1-5-2-release-adobe-accurate-tone-rendeding-support (I use that software mostly to cull images for sharpness.).

There are some x-rite/Sekonic videos where Joe Brady demonstrates the ColorChecker Passport. I keep reading about the "Olympus Blues" being strong by default, but they are even more pronounced with the Passport when used correctly from a profile made from it and used with the correct software (I use profiles within DxO PhotoLab 2.).

I set my cameras WB manually 95% of the time in conjunction with a color temperature meter as well as the drone camera (Although DJI didn't install a tint control yet so I have to use a CC Green filter on a $7K drone!). If I have a gray card, I open the RAW image with the Olympus software and look to see if the RGB values are around 118 for all three. That tells me the exposure was nailed as well as the WB, and then I'm set to screw it up as I see fit. If I'm really picky, I can read the RGB values of my gray card(s) with a Colormunki Photo and apply those numbers to what the Olympus software reports since gray cards can deviate a few RGB points. I also found my WB in the E-M1ii and E-M1X seem to prefer a +5 Amber and -1 Green in the fine-tuning part of the Manual White Balance since Olympus has included that for the recent firmware in the E-M1ii that was a carryover from the E-M1X.

The Auto White Balance can work well for video though. With it I can zero all three of the RGB lines into one white line looking at the waveform off a gray card (Similar to one shown on page two on here.). From then on it's "Fingers crossed with video" as the scene changes. Often I'm back to Manual WB though with the drone given it's orientation with the sky blues.

 

[ac12]

I'm going to have to try this myself.
Shot basketball at the gym with the EM1-mk2, and the colors are WAY different than my D7200, which is close to what my eye sees.
So Olympus auto WB does not deal with the gym light as well as the Nikon auto WB.

The expo disc is a neat idea, but with various size lenses, it becomes expensive.
Unless you get the largest possible size and just hold the largest disc size onto the lens when you shoot.

 

[frankmulder]

The expo disc is a neat idea, but with various size lenses, it becomes expensive.
Unless you get the largest possible size and just hold the largest disc size onto the lens when you shoot.

That's what I do: hold the 77mm ExpoDisc in front of the lens (which is the smallest version as far as I know, but larger than the diameter of any of my lenses). Works perfectly and takes just a few seconds. I was really happy I had it last week while doing a shoot in a room with challenging lighting. Skin tones came out very nice.

 

[Paulb123]

So I use auto white balance (fn3) but probably not in the way it should be used. When I am in a stately home, the rooms are often very badly lit to save the sunlight from ruining the textures. So I use a white napkin from the cafe to auto white balance the room so I can see the real colours of the textiles e.g. the tapestry and carpets. Even if no photos are taken (and there are often no photos), the EVF provides an augmented reality of colour that is much closer to what the textile makers wanted us to see than what we can see in the room.