Ideal settings for snow scenes?

Spie

Spie

Spie

Godfather
Godfather
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17 Oct 2002
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I usually overexpose by a stop or so when shooting snow scenes but am never 100% what to do with WB? What would you sat was the ideal colour temperature for a bright clear day?

I realise it's not critical when shooting RAW but it still has to be adjust PP.
 
Personally i'm ALWAYS on AWB. But I always shoot in RAW aswell which means I make most of the corrections in Lightroom/Photoshop.

I had a shoot the other day and overexposed slightly but it looked like I was shooting in front of a white backdrop with a few trees in there :p
 
It's tricky, it depends on what the light / sky is doing. If it's very overcast, you'll probably want a slightly different balance to if it's sunny. If you want to fox it on the camera, you could try doing a custom white balance with the snow as the white-level.

As above, it's usually easiest to shoot in RAW and correct in PP.
 
I'm the same, shoot in RAW and worry about white balance later. The only time I worry about it is when shooting jpg or using flash (especially with artificial lighting and flash).
 
Lads, I'm aware I can correct in PP, but I wanted to know what colour temperature would be a good starting point, especially as I'm shooting RAW + small JPG at the moment.
 
Shooting in snow is always tricky, if you do want to use custom white balance then as said using the snow as the white level is the way to go but you may well need to re adjust the WB for each scene shot as shadows and daylight will vary across them making the snow vary in whites.
 
I use 6250K with a slight cast towards magenta perhaps. I try not to use AWB because it just gives (well before lightroom) a lot of hassle having to go through every RAW file.

Try the Cloudy setting thats about 6500K in most cases. Or custom WB off the snow, but I tried that and it was a little off a bit too green.
 
I just bump mine on AWB, shoot RAW and overexpose my shots by +0.7 to +1.0.
I did a custom WB on the snow but to be honest, I didn't see a lot of difference apart from variation between shots at different angle to the snow. So stuck with AWB and PP them when I got back.
 
I use a "Digital Grey Kard" card for setting the white balance on the GF1. Nice and small and easy to keep in pocket or camera bag, plus custom WB on the GF1 is sooooo easy to do.
 
If you do a custom white balance won't that make the snow 18% grey? You might need to add a little to get it a nice white.

I could be wrong, my knowledge of exposure is actually poor and something I need to learn more about.
 
ScarySquirrel said:
If you do a custom white balance won't that make the snow 18% grey? You might need to add a little to get it a nice white.

I could be wrong, my knowledge of exposure is actually poor and something I need to learn more about.
Click to expand...

That would be metering off the snow.

The automatically controlled picture you take to set the white balance from would be 18% grey. Then camera would read the tint a temp of the colour and turn what might be say a blue tint on the snow into a perfectly netural grey.

Then you don't use the snow for anything else afterward. You'll either meter a blue sky and use that with perhaps a little correction (my prefered method) or perhaps do a little guesswork and overexpose half to one and a half stop.
 
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