White Balance Mysteries

[Yury Ivanov]

So I have a DVX100 and love it. I shoot alot of outdoor nature wildlife using 30P mode...Recently I was doing about a month of shooting out West, Montana, Wyoming etc...

So trying to get the best (most correct) color temperature, I always try to white balance the camera manually (zoom in on a white card and hold the button). The camera goes through it's cycles and always shows success. However MANY of times I find the color temp has an over all GREEN TINT to it. What the hell is going on and how do I fix it?

I find this happens most often when I am shooting in very bright light (sunny day). I try rebalancing and sometimes I can get rid of the greenish hue and sometimes not. If I can't fix it I resort to using the Auto WB and that seems to work pretty well.
However I want to figure out what the problem is so I can Manually WB and get the most correct WB.

Any thoughts?

THanks!

[Marc Martin]

I've found the same problem. Solution that I've found: in the menu, go to SCENE FILE -> COLOUR TEMP and increase the value between +3 or +5 (depend how you like the image, +3 gives a little warm, + 4 more natural, and +5 a little cold). Leave the CHROMA PHASE to 0. Save the SCENE.

If you're using the preset (3200-5600K), the COLOUR TEMP parameter has no effect. So stay in Manual WB.

The 3200K preset is OK in artificial light, but I don't like the 5600K in natural light.

[Nathan Gifford]

A couple of things:

• Are you sure that your monitor is properly calibrated?
  If it isn't then you cannot be sure if the problem is the white balance or the monitor.
• Have you oversaturated CCD when white balancing?
  That can do strange things too. Try stopping down the camera some.

You might also want to use search on this board and look up "gray card" or "grey card." There are apile of posts on the pros and cons of using a gray card.