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White Balance
This page looks into white balance, using a Macbeth Color Checker card and a Gossen Color Pro IIIf color meter. The goal is to establish a color temperature correlation between measured color temperature and the color temperature to feed into Nikon’s Capture NX 2 v2.1.1 for accurate white balance. With accurate white balance, most colors fall into a pleasing arrangement about neutral gray, though critical accuracy requires camera profiling under controlled lighting conditions.
Test conditions
The test was shot outdoors about 13:30 on Jan 4, 2009 in the San Francisco Bay Area, at approximately 37° 23' 16" N. The day was sunny, but with high hazy clouds. At that location, date, and time of day, mid-day light tends to be on the warm side.
A several-year-old mini Macbeth Color Checker card was used as the grayscale reference, and photographed, together with a Gossen Color Pro IIIf ambient light color meter. There is no guarantee that the Macbeth Color Checker card is perfectly neutral; it is not brand new. The ambient light color temperature was checked before and after the frame was taken, to ensure that atmospheric conditions/lighting had not changed the measured value.
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Diglloyd DAP is DSLR-oriented, but also contains workflow and other topics. Much of the focus is on Canon and Nikon but also Pentax and Pentax medium format.
Special emphasis is placed on lens evaluation, focusing on Canon and Nikon and Sigma lenses, but with a few others like Rokinon/Samyang.
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