Your thoughts on white balance
 

So okay, I am probably guilty of this one thing more than anything else when out with the camera. I will wind up taking a lot of shots on a beautiful sunny morning and then realize I still have the white balance set on "cloudy" or vice versa. Just how much of a difference does this make to the overall quality of the photo?

Hi KC, being color-blind, I deal with this issue by shooting RAW and fixing the appropriate WB post-capture during conversion, with my "color consultant" at my side. Regards, Romy

Most DSLR photographers use auto white balance. In many cases white balance will be right or nearly right but if you shoot RAW then it is possible to change white balance to taste in RAW conversion software. The only way of shooting with correct white balance is to use 'custom' mode and taking a test shot of a 18% grey card. However if the light changes then another custom reading will need to be taken to sample correct white balance for the new light.

I think I have only changed the white balance once just to give it a try. I have found the Auto does a very good job without having to change anything, if I want to play around with colour I can do that in the editing software. That is the big difference with digital you are are not tied to making sure you have it right in camera.

As Steven says, if you shoot in RAW then the white balance can be set aftewards with no detriment to the image. If however you shoot in JPG its more imortant to get it right. While you can adjust the colour balance in your editing software, post processing will degrade the image to some extent.

To see the difference between shooting in cloudy & sunny and auto, try taking three consecutive images of the same scene with the different settings. Sometinme the mood of an image can be improved by using the "wrong" white balance :D

Hmmmm .... I can't say I'm all that impressed with the auto white balance my 20Ds deliver. Sometimes it's just plain wrong. The main area of difficulty is cloudy days. You can overcome this by setting a manual white balance - but then I always forget to set it back to auto when the sun comes out again. Many a good shot of mine has been messed up by bad white balance. Maybe I should shoot raw with my landscape/macro body and only use jpegs for the bird work.

Have you all heard of Expodisc... http://expodisc.com/ an interesting alternative to grey card.