Advice correcting WB !!!

[Jaybs]

I've just returned from the US having driven from Lost Wages to SF. In Big Pine I awoke to beautiful weather, and slogged the Dodge Stratus hire-car up to 10,000 ft to shoot some Bristlecone Pines. Later that day I discovered that I'd set the D70 to Tungsten! I desperately need a batch conversion to Sunlight white-balance: the photos are all large Fine JPEG.

Any suggestions or advice most welcome. I do have two shots taken sequentially (Tungsten/Auto WB) at the point when I discovered the error!

John

[JSPhoto]

Theres another recent thread on this subject in Viewfinder or Help, check it out, there were several responses on it.

JS

[cyberlord]

JPG makes it a little harder, but its still possible and pretty easy if you have Photoshop. (probably other graphics programs too but I only know PS)

In PS you create a levels layer on top of your background layer (your image to be adjusted).

Hit OK for now, we'll come back to the levels layer in a sec.

Create a Thresholds layer.

Drag the slider to the left until you have only a few black areas on your screen. Does not need to be exact.

Hit OK

Grab your color sampler tool (not the eyedropper, but its in the same tool icon as the eyedropper.

Find a black area on the screen and select within it.

Double click on your thresholds layer again and this time slide the slider all the way to the right until you have only a few white areas on your screen.

Hit OK.

Take your color sampler dropper again and select in the white area.

Hit OK

Now delete (drag it to the trashcan) the thresholds layer, you wont need it any more.

Now double click your levels layer.

Click the left most dropper icon and then click the #1 marker on your screen (left by the color sampler tool).

Now click the right most dropper and select the #2 marker on your screen.

Now click the middle dropper and (this is the tricky part) find something that is supposed to be (actual color) neutral grey and click that color.

Bingo, you just did a manual color balance.

Hit OK.

Now, you can't make an action for this, but you can drag the levels layer from the edited image and drag it into all you other images (in PS) and the same color correction will be applied to all of them. It does take a bit of work, but its not hard.

If you had shot in RAW mode the correction would have been easier.

Hope this helps.

Tim

Edit: It was late and I was tired when I originally posted this. I fixed a few errors that made the proceedure confusing unless you had done manual color balance before.

[Franglais]

I've just returned from the US having driven from Lost Wages to SF. In Big Pine I awoke to beautiful weather, and slogged the Dodge Stratus hire-car up to 10,000 ft to shoot some Bristlecone Pines. Later that day I discovered that I'd set the D70 to Tungsten! I desperately need a batch conversion to Sunlight white-balance: the photos are all large Fine JPEG.

Any suggestions or advice most welcome. I do have two shots taken sequentially (Tungsten/Auto WB) at the point when I discovered the error!

John

Someone else has given you the real answer for your current problem. My advice is for the future is:

- shoot RAW
- buy Nikon Capture to treat your images

This sort of problem just doesn't happen when you do this. I leave my Nikons on Auto White Balance the whole time. When I get home if I realise that the camera has got the White Balance wrong I just change the white balance in Nikon Capture. I can also change a host of other parameters like exposure, sharpness, contrast, curves, saturation... Then I generate the JPG from the RAW.

Charles

[another view]

That high up in elevation, I'm not sure that "daylight" is what you're looking for - I think you might need something a little higher than that. Try one image first to see what works best before converting all of them.