Camera white balance Does not matter as long as you shoot raw.
I’ve set my camera to UniWB in order to get as much light without clipping and therefore less noise, which will show up in bright areas.
B&W Select the black and white setting.
You could use the color settings to make things more complicated…
Difference in color models Best thing is to try the different settings to see what they do with your shots.
I most often use “Basic” and presaturation levels between 1 and 3. Here’s a series of trials that will probably not help you except for trying a similar thing yourself:
Note: Color model is visible in the filename, saturation level increases from left to right. “Kopie 3” means that saturation level was set to 3 (medium). We can easily see that the “none” color model yields results that seem to be independent of saturation settings. Saturation levels above 3 are too much for my taste and differences between Basic/Frontier/Noritsu exist but are hard to make out in the screenshot.
I have a PDF that show differences more clearly, but I can’t post it here because the forum does not accept PDF files… I’ll try this and who knows what your color management/browser will do…
UniWB is a special White Balance. The goal of UniWB is to display a histogram that represents raw data instead of data taken from the out-of-camera jpeg image.
With UniWB, you can see if any of the r, g or b channels are clipped or not. This means that you can expose to the right (ETTR) to get more light onto the sensor and therefore get lower noise in dark areas. UniWB is a workaround because camera makers do not provide raw histograms directly.
Left image: Screenshot of the display of the camera set to one of the available white balances.
note that exposure had to be diminished by 1/3 to keep the red within bounds.
Right image: Camera set to UniWB
note that exposure was increased by 2/3 - a full stop more compared to the standard setting.
note the green tinge of the image. Out of camera jpgs are not usable (except for Halloween maybe)
Noise lurks in the dark. Increasing exposure lowers noise in dark areas of the image. After negative conversion, these parts will be bright.
Last words: UniWB is a few years old and new sensors have lower noise, UniWB’s benefit is therefore reduced. Nevertheless, it enables us to see what we get before pressing the shutter. Also note that UniWB works on low contrast scenes (like negatives) and does not help with high contrast scenes.
Fore more information and how to create a UniWB, search the internet or check out the following pages:
