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GH2 White balance issue?

F

Foggy

I have recently picked up a 'known' 18% grey card in order to to help with my white balance and allow me to use my new lightmeter.

However I have just been experimenting with it and the results are far from expected.

I am in a room with one big incandescent chinese lantern as the light source, the AWB does a decent job of representing the colours in the room and the 2800k manual setting is very very close to what the AWB gives but ever so slightly warmer(actually colder in temperature terms but a warmer feel) , I feel like the correct white balance is somewhere between whatever the AWB is giving and the manual setting of 2800k.

However I then went on to use the card with some strange results. I navigated to the first of 4 presets which I assume save whatever you put on them and can be used again if you know the lighting hasn't changed. I then laid the grey card on my bed and without changing the angle or tilt of the camera I took a picture with the small box completely filled with the grey card. However the outcome was a very very blue white balance, the nearest I could manually set it to that matched was somewhere in the high 6000's! I then tried the white side of my grey card but got very similar results.

Am I being stupid and doing something wrong?

Cheers.
 
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I have a Canon so can't comment on the GH2 white balance workflow.

But...

I am in a room with one big incandescent chinese lantern as the light source...
Click to expand...

I have had terrible results doing a custom white balance (using a popular grey card) in many low light situations.

If a room or location is lit fairly well, my custom white balance always produces excellent results.

If it's poorly lit, the custom white balance typically produces pretty damn terrible results.

...as to why? I don't know...
.
 
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What color were the sheets? I have a theory, but I never use AWB on my GH2. I always dial it in would recommend that over trying to use AWB with a card. Having said that, I am not authoritative or anything, it's just my preference.

When you WB broadcast cameras in this way, you want to fill the entire frame with the card. There is a product called "Warm Cards" that are used to skew WB on these cameras to creative effect. Some of the cards are bluish, while others are yellowish. Using the "blue" card causes the camera to read more blue light than is in scene, thus warming the image. If your sheets were on the warm side of the spectrum, and filling the frame around your gray card, the skew towards a cool color balance would make sense.

I don't really know if the GH2's AWB function evaluates the frame or the center "small box," and I am also unsure if that functionality is baked in or controlled by a setting (like I said, I never really use AWB on mine), but you could easily test it out by running a white balance with the card in the same place, but with only the card in frame and see if the results are different.
 
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Cheers folks,

After some experimentation it seems it really doesn't like low light,the accuracy goes right down.Under most circumstances it has now been fine.
 
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