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White Balance (20080820)

I am trying to show the difficulty I have getting an acceptable white balance and colour for my Canon 30D compared to my Canon 3G. I first noticed the problem a few weeks ago, when I was trying to get a decent shot with my cactus which is currently blooming. The 3G does a spectacular job out of the box with an easy and accurate white balance compensation adjustment. The 30D is way more complex, and has unsatisfactory results.

The first image pair shows how the 3G's default JPEG image output is enhanced by the internal camera software. The left image is just converted from RAW, but the right JPEG image has much better contrast and saturation.

After trying ineffectively on the 30D to use the manual white balance, and then a whole skew of different colour temperatures, I then tried, along with setting the custom white balance, adjusting the nifty White Balance Shift to different colours. In the second row, where I was able to find some success (left image), I used Blue +3 / Green +4 to compensate for the bluish hue. I then added some contrast and saturation to get some decent results in the right image.

I finally found that by taking a RAW image with my 3G, and then using the that camera's RGB values for the 30D's dcraw conversion, I could get much better results. The third row shows what the 30D yields with its AWB values on the left, and the image processed with the 3G's Custom White Balance values on the right. This is about as extreme an example as possible. I still need to enhance the contrast and saturation to match the default 3G's default image.

2008-08-22 Update:
While checking out my 30D settings the other day, I just happened to notice that the "Picture Style" settings were still on default, which was my screw-up, as I thought I had copied all the settings to the body when back from repair, but I guessed I never saved that change.
This would definitely affect the contrast and saturation. {:-)

Select image thumbnail for large WWW version, image name for information


CRW 2434 (572x768 101KB)
3G RAW
IMG 2426 (576x768 104KB)
3G auto, the benchmark

IMG 2495 1 (512x768 86KB)
30D using White Balance Shift
Blue +3 / Green +4
IMG 2495 2 (512x768 92KB)
from left, plus additional
contrast and saturation

IMG 2569 1 (512x768 92KB)
using 30D AWB values
IMG 2569 2 (512x768 100KB)
using 3G Custom White Balance values
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