5D Mk III White Balance confusion

[billium99]

Hi All,

Long-time reader/experimenter, first-time poster. I searched for a bit and I can't seem to find answers to some newb questions of mine:

I'm using a recent ML build - recording 1920x1080 raw - all is going great except for white balance. I understand that my camera settings don't carry over to the raw or MLV files - I'm currently in MLV mode.

When I do a custom white balance in-camera, my preview looks marvelous, accurate, etc. But how do I tell what the adjustment is on the camera?

Using MLV Mystic to convert to RAW, then raw2dng to create the dng files is not appearing to transfer accurate white balance settings to Adobe Camera raw.

Or if it is, then I'm horribly confused how my final processed DNG sequence is red-shifted all to hell.

My source lights are LED panels with temperature settings. I'm using the 5500 temperature to mimic morning light coming in a room. Adobe camera raw does show 5500 as my "as shot" default setting, but the images look far too red/brown.

What am I missing? Why wouldn't a similar setting in Adobe Camera Raw give me similar results to my in-camera preview during the shoot?

Thank you

Bill

[billium99]

Maybe another way to ask this is: is it likely that using 5500 K LED panel lights would have the camera choose a custom white balance of 5500?

Or would "balancing" the 5500k from the panels lead to a different temperature for in-camera custom white balance to be accurate?

Then I'm back to the original question - when using Custom White Balance, is there a way to know what the actual camera WB temp is set to?

Thanks

Bill

[chmee]

@billium99 do you get better results with raw2cdng? the wb-thing is not implemented in every tool.

[billium99]

Hi Chmee,

Do you mean raw2dng or is there a raw2cdng that I'm missing?

raw2dng gives me the current results with the red shift and the white balance "reporting" as-shot: 5500.

Unless I don't understand how to calculate white balance (entirely possible!). In any case, it looks bad, where the preview looked great. I get that the preview would contain other settings, but I don't really have a lot of custom settings going. It's really as if the red-shifted dng images I'm looking at are lacking any white balance at all, just like it's supposed to be, but then applying 5500 doesn't seem to be getting me close to my preview look.

Thanks for your time

Bill

[reddeercity]

If on a  PC Check this thread "The CinemaDNG Discussion (raw2cdng)"  --> http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5618.msg39204#msg39204

[billium99]

Yep that was it! Thanks Chmee for this great work and thanks Reddeercity for letting me know I didn't dig deep enough!



Bill