Don’t Take White Balance (WB) for Granted

Yesterday it rained all day, and I felt like taking a walk in the rain with my Pentax K-5 and the 18 – 55 mm weather resistant lens.  I didn’t get any remarkable pictures but I did discover something as well as getting wet.  I don’t know why I took the above picture.  It is a shot of my L.L. Bean rubber bottomed boots … a necessity around here due to all the rain this year.

After I got home and downloaded my pictures and was going through them, my wife looking over my shoulder noted that the color was off.  In my first run through my processed pictures, the boots were blue and not brown.  I had taken the pictures using auto WB.  The particulars for the above picture were:  55 mm, ISO 400, f/5.6, 1/100 sec.  Obviously the WB was off.  After changing the WB to a cloudy setting (6500) in LR, all of the colors looked more accurate as shown above.

In the past I have taken the WB for granted, always shooting in auto WB mode, and not making changes while processing in LR unless I noticed an obvious color cast.  In looking back through other pictures taken with that combination, I noticed that others had WB issues, except for those taken in bright sunlight.   If something in the scene is white to 18% gray, it isn’t hard to set the WB for each picture while shooting raw files, but how do you do it after the fact in scenes where you don’t remember the accurate colors?  I wonder if they have waterproof 18% gray cards?  Maybe the lesson is to never take WB for granted and always take a picture of something you know what the color should be for each series of pictures in similar lighting.