Proper exposure, color and white balance on 400D (XTi)

Hello All,
Thanks all for the valuable suggestion. Yes..the Sigma lens is not that great ..as were with some folks at the Airshow 🙂
I had been on Saturday and Sunday, so I’ll shoot on Saturday, learn from the mistakes and correct on Sunday.

On Saturday it was fully clouded and on Sunday it was partially clouded, and in my excitement I did lots of mistake in metering (Centre weighted, Manual, ISO 400 (mostly) ) .. after every series of photos I would examine the histogram and the subject to see if I did any mistake, and try to compensate in the next shot.
White balancing was mostly in setting for Clouded, except on Sunday where some times I changed to sunlight.

Also as the direction (I was pointing to) changed so did the light intensity on the subject there.. well I don’t know how to adapt to that.

About the metering, I would look at some grey cloud (that I would guess to be at 18% grey) and get the metering, shoot some shots, quickly check the histogram and see if some details was available of the subject, Well the LCD display on 400D is not that great, but Okay for an amateur like me.

It was a Great experience, here are some of the photos I uploaded. Did some resizing due to size limits using MS Paint.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14497022@N04/

Thanks
Vignesh

White balance, while not wanting to start a war or anything but the Levels adjustment is an unpredictable beast.
Even the author of the levels tutorial admits this Levels adjustments are not a “one-size fits all”. Don’t be afraid to experiment to get a feel of what works and what doesn’t. This method is often far more accurate than a one-click Auto-Levels adjustment, and as always, proper monitor calibration is very important.

There is another much better method using a Threshold adjustment layer but that’s another story.

Get it right first time.

One item not mentioned so far is making sure that your Firmware for the 400D is kept up to date, there is a new update not long out which makes it the third Firmware update that has been released for the 400D so far.

The latest version for the 400D is Ver 1.1.1 and here is a link to it below
http://web.canon.jp/imaging/eosdigital3/e4kr3_firmware-e.html

I was not happy at all at first with my 400D due to the exposure problems I was getting with sunshine on white surfaces, photos were turning out far too dark and the grass had a red/brown tint in it.

I figured out that changing to CENTRE WEIGHTED metering and altering the picture style from STANDARD to NEUTRAL helped quite a lot.

Nowadays I’m much happier with the Camera and do not experience the exposure issues that I used to in the past.

I would presume that keeping the Firmware up to date has had quite a bit to do with the improvement that I have had with the Camera, when it came out there were so many gripes from folk about exposure problems but that seems to have died away a lot from what I hear from friends and read on web site.

Fred.

Auto white balance will only work properly when there is something white in the frame. Not much of a problem if you shoot RAW but a big one if you shoot JPEG as it can not be corrected afterwards.

http://www.eyefetch.com/tutorial-white-balance-ps.aspx

Moggy 🙂

Auto white balance will only work properly when there is something white in the frame. Not much of a problem if you shoot RAW but a big one if you shoot JPEG as it can not be corrected afterwards.
I would shoot RAW and either buy a bulk storage device or pick up new cards at Wal-Mart as you need them.

Remember, there is no substitute for thinking your shot through and if that does not work then try something else.

#2: I have a 2gig Card, not sure if I should use RAW ?
#3: Is it possible to get good result with out Photo Editing (as I dont have any s/w nor do I know to use it)

I can’t see the point in using RAW without photo-editing software to work on the resulting image.

Moggy

What manc said is spot on. I was assuming you are going to fill the frame with your object.

If you are only getting that close at 300mm then you need to try the evaluative meter. Don’t worry about the FOVC, in fact if you shot this at ISO 200 you might have still gotten away with 1/500 @ f/8 but even then since you are not filling the frame you are better off with evaluative.

This is not important at this stage, but later on you need to know that your consumer grade 70-300mm Sigma/tamron/Canon whatever will be soft at 300mm but in this context that does not apply.

Do you have other pics? Or you are only interested in this specific pic?
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ROOR BONG

If your subject is not filling the area of the partial metering then it will not doubt try and expose the sky therefore leaving your subject dark.

I tried spot metering on the weekend, work a treat, but partial was just as good. RAW will take about 7Mb a file so work out how many shots you will take. Probably get about 200 shots on your card in RAW.

Editing does enhance the photo. But there is only so much you can fix. So get the exposure right then the editing should only be dust spots, sat, levelling and sharpen.

Good luck!

Hi George, Thanks!
1) I agree with you, normally I set it to manual with center wtd, but on this camera I seem to get Sky painted white.
2) I understand. 🙂
So far in my experiments with this new camera has yielded not to promising results. 🙁

I am not able to analyze the mistake. uploading the image of CH-53, Shot at full zoom of 300mm (sigma) so I assume 480mm (effective) ? I tried to adjust the exposure to get blue sky and good details of CH-53, but That dint happen.
It was hand held, ISO 400, f8, 1/1000sec, manual.

1) You want to use partial metering. There is no point using matrix coz the object in most cases is a singular and in the center of the frame (or in tight formation).

AWB has worked for me.

2) If you get trigger happy and like to use 3 fps then you will fill up 2Gb pretty fast if you shoot RAW + JPEG-S. That totally depends on your style of shooting.

3) Sure!!! Thats what you SHOULD be aspiring for. This “I will fix it in PS” is the wrong mentality to have. You need to do everything YOU can on site and then PS will assist you in enhancing or saving pics. It wont make a bad pic any better.
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