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White Balance Frustration
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GComm_Osmo
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United States
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I'm a pro user with a new Osmo... I'm having trouble with the white balance of the camera (X3).
Is there no way of locking the white balance or manually setting a true custom WB?

What is called a  "custom" WB seems to be just a Kelvin temp selector...
I need a true custom white balance function as exists in just about every other digital camera in the world;
point the camera at a neutral color - gray or white - press a button and lock in that white balance.

Alternately (or additionally) I would like to lock the camera's AWB, so that once it automatically white balances the color won't drift if the camera moves.

Some other notes about where the white balance features seem painfully primitive:
Let's call the "Custom" setting "Kelvin" because that's what it seems to be.
The exterior daylight presets should include "Shade" as well as "Cloudy" and "Sunny".
"Neon"? What the heck is "Neon"? DJI must mean "Fluorescent".
BTW, "Fluorescent" is nowhere close to any fluorescent source I've been under so far.

For bonus points:
How about a 4-way matrix of blue/amber & green/magenta to manually offset any white ballance setting?

If anyone has any insight into anything I've missed, or misunderstood, please chime in!
Thanks!

2016-1-7
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Phantom Paul
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Philippines
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I second this! Will be great if we can have a real custom WB setting, not just a Kelvin temp selector as pointed out by GComm.
2016-1-7
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jeff_kirkland
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Australia
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I agree - a true custom point-at-a-white-card-and-click white balance would be great - and probably not that hard to implement, so I'll keep my fingers crossed someone passes that thought onto the DJI engineering dept.  

Having said that, the X3 is a point and shoot camera at heart, so I appreciate even being able to dial in the Kelvin temp.  I've got to grade the D-Log footage in post anyway so a quick white balance correction at the same time isn't that big a deal.
2016-1-7
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DJI-Amy
DJI team

Hong Kong
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Thanks, I will report your suggestion to the engineers.
2016-1-7
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martin94b
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United Kingdom
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Hi,

I do not quite understand your issue here.
You say "custom WB seems to be just a Kelvin Temp selector" - why "just"?
The Kelvin Temp selector covers the entire range of the WB settings you need, and it´s just another (equivalent) representation of "sunny" or "cloudy" or "Fluorescent" or whatever WB user interface.

Taking a sample image of a dedicated reflection free grey card (neither white nor black will do correctly) also is just another way / use case of presetting a WB within the range of the Kelvin temperature selector.

Since you are a "pro user" I am sure you can identify a somewhat sufficient Kelvin Temperature when starting your recording. To finetune the WB even further you still can record a grey card and perform an additional - minor - WB correction in Postproduction. There is only one little disadvantage to that procedure which might slightly effect your result:

WB is nothing else but the relative weighting of the Raw R-G-B  colour values (e.g. 10 or 12 Bit per colour) with respect to each other before writing the final (8 Bit) image, would you agree?
Now if you perform additional WB correction with the 8 Bit image afterwards, you might push some very very bright colour values above the 8 Bit limit (i.e. value of 255), leading to single colour saturation and thus a minor colour shift of these particular saturated pixels. (I am sure >95% of population would not be able to see that.) The rest of the image (and all frames which stay below colour values of 255) would not be affected at all and the Post-WB correction would just look as its supposed to be. And the better your initial WB Kelvin Temp choice, the less colour shift. Would you also agree to that?
(OK, would be great to record movies in RAW >10Bit colour depth to have some headroom for later WB correction, but that´s nothing you can expect from an Osmo?!)

Now if you cannot live with these minor colour shift limitations as a Pro, you could also go ahead and slightly underexpose your movie, let´s say -0.5 EV. Then you get a little Headroom within your recorded 8 Bit colours and can perform Post WB correction even without / less colour shift. The price for doing that is a slightly higher quantum noise, but the difference won´t be visible at all (while Osmo is not the least noisy camera anyway and electric (dark) noise is >> quantum noise...).

Just my 2 cents...
2016-1-8
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GComm_Osmo
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martin94b Posted at 2016-1-8 07:44
Hi,

I do not quite understand your issue here.

"You say "custom WB seems to be just a Kelvin Temp selector" - why "just"?
The Kelvin Temp selector covers the entire range of the WB settings you need, and it´s just another (equivalent) representation of "sunny" or "cloudy" or "Fluorescent" or whatever WB user interface. "


Hi Martin,
A quick response to clarify for the community and especially the DJI team.

In the real world there are far too many situations in which the lighting color is mixed.
Perfect 5600K daylight and perfect 3200K studio incandescent can be hard to come by.
Dialing a Kelvin temp can be useful (I do it often on other cameras) but it cannot help if there are other sources that are otherwise colored.

Some very real examples that I've encountered include:
Fluorescent lighting which can skew to the green to various degrees, even to the point of being over-corrected to magenta .
LEDs, of course, which are never the color printed in the marketing materials.
A canopy of trees in the summer where the sunlight is bouncing into and through green leaves.
Neon in a nightclub that leaks in because you can't turn off a sign or put up a big enough solid.
Windows in office buildings and vehicles which always add green.
Industrial discharge sources at warehouses, athletic venues and even city streets.

A good colorist with a big, fat file can fix these issues, but I prefer to get it right in-camera.
I think that's the best way to work, no matter the bit depth.
2016-1-8
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GComm_Osmo
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DJI-Amy Posted at 2016-1-7 21:26
Thanks, I will report your suggestion to the engineers.

Thank you Amy.
I sincerely hope you do!
My company's technical team will be at NAB and I will ask them to spent some time at the DJI booth.
Best regards,
2016-1-8
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martin94b
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Germany
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GComm_Osmo Posted at 2016-1-8 16:14
"You say "custom WB seems to be just a Kelvin Temp selector" - why "just"?
The Kelvin Temp selector ...

Ok,

now you confused me even more...

I fully understand your description of different light sources blending into your image / set / motives leading to a "colourfull" yet unwanted mix of WB moods within one image or movie.

You wrote you "prefer to get it right in-camera" - but how is that supposed to work? What do you now expect from the DJI technicians? Some magical tricks to escape physics?

If there are multiple light sources blending differently into each other depending on the position of the motive you try to capture (cold white LED light from the left and a candle from the right for instance) your WB compensation would need to be different for every single pixel! And while talking about movies - the pixel specific compensation would have to be adopted "on the fly" requesting some magic intelligence within the camera to be able to differenciate between true color differences of your motives and WB differences due to light changing situations?

Even the human eye - which is famous for being able to quickly adopt to different light sources and doing a "WB" permanently kind of on the fly - if you have a multiple light source situation with different colour temperatures your eye cannot compensate that - leading to visable differences of that effect.

Just as you said: that can only be compensated by a good colorist in Post Production.

Maybe I am on the wrong track here or missing something?
Or are you simply asking for options to do WB compensation even outside the range of Kelvin Temp scale (your example of greenish light inside cars)? But that would neither be able to compensate WB in your examples of mixed light sources?!

Confused Regards and nice WE,
Martin


2016-1-8
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GComm_Osmo
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martin94b Posted at 2016-1-8 09:56
Ok,

now you confused me even more...

"You wrote you "prefer to get it right in-camera" - but how is that supposed to work? What do you now expect from the DJI technicians? Some magical tricks to escape physics?"

Nope, no magic Martin.
Just the ability to color balance an image so that white appears white under any ordinary lighting condition. It's a common feature of just about all video cameras made since the 80's.
Sony, Canon, Panasonic and JVC have all figured it out, so I'm hopeful DJI will be able to manage it.

Sadly, I just can't seem to explain it well.  Several other positive replies above lead me, though,  to think that I'm on the right track here... so I'm encouraged that other users have identified this shortcoming as well.

Happy shooting,
2016-1-8
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martin94b
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Germany
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GComm_Osmo Posted at 2016-1-8 21:06
"You wrote you "prefer to get it right in-camera" - but how is that supposed to work? What do you n ...

OK, so I guess you desire a WB (i.e. levelling of RGB values or as you say white appears white) which is even outside the Kelvin Temp range?! Rather than doing WB under constantly changing diverse light sources (which I call "magic"). Correct?
2016-1-8
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jeff_kirkland
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Australia
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Hey Martin, I think you're finally getting it.    dialing Kelvin only let's you warm or cool the image but assumes the light you're dealing with is fairly consistent across the entire spectrum - which anyone who's shot with fluorescents or LEDs will tell you isn't true.. A custom white balance will pull the RGB curves into line so that white is white, or neutral grey is neutral, or whatever.  In order of sophistication you have auto balance, the presets, adjustable Kelvin, then custom white balance.  You don't always want to do a custom white balance - eg, shooting under the green canopy of a forrest, you may want to keep the green cast, but there are just as many times, especially if, for example, you're shooting in mixed colour conditions, or with an LED panel of doubtful pedigree, etc, that you want to get it right in camera.

You can balance things in post, although it takes a lot more effort, and when time is money, or your footage has to cut in with other cameras, or you're handing footage off to someone else to do post production, you really want to get things as close to balanced as you can when you shoot. Not to mention that, with a lot of the companies I work for, if I handed in footage where i'd had an opportunity to custom white balance but didn't, I'd be on the receiving end of some serious frowning.

This is getting away from the Osmo and the original intent of the thread but given that almost every professional video camera made in the last 30 years has a custom white balance option, I'm now really curious about what camera you use and what sort of shooting you do that you don't seem to have been exposed to the concept and the reasons for using it.

I guess you always have the time to fix it in post?
2016-1-9
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martin94b
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jeff_kirkland Posted at 2016-1-9 14:25
Hey Martin, I think you're finally getting it.    dialing Kelvin only let's you warm or cool the i ...

Hi Jeff,

I guess we are both on almost the exact same page, just looking at WB from different points of view / perspectives. While you come from a scenario / use case based perspective I am looking at it from a very technical perspective (which is what I am used to being an engineer for medical imaging devices).

Let´s try to further align both perspectives - while I still think we mean the same thing.

Bottom line (as I wrote in my first post in this thread):
"WB is nothing else but the relative weighting of the RAW R-G-B color values (...) with respect to each other before writing the final (8 Bit) image, would you agree?"
So after a perfect WB a real grey card will result in equal RGB values - for all brightness values. Or (same thing, different wording) white gets white.

Just for clearification what I mean by "relative weighting":
Different light sources have different light "temperatures", a candlelight is pretty warm (i.e. more red, less blue spectrum) while clouds or shadow have more blue and less red. That results in different RGB weighting on the camera chip as well (RAW). So just as an example: in candle light an image of a grey card would have Red values "pushed" by factor 1.1 while Blue values have been reduced by factor 0.9. That would lead to a "warm" image while grey would not be represented with equal RGB values as supposed to.

Now what the WB does in general is trying to compensate / reverse that effect of pushed / diminished RGB values, so in this example the red values have to be divided by factor 1.1 and the blue values divided by 0.9. Then you get equal digits for each RGB value for your grey card and a neutral colorsheme as desired.

I hope we are still on the same track?!

Now lets talk about the user interface of the WB - and that´s probably where I got confused by GComm_Osmos original post:
He states (or at least that how I understood his post) that in addition to the Kelvin Temperature correction he would like to have settings with "sunny" - "cloudy" - "Shadow" etc. And to my understanding and what I just demonstrated above THAT is the exact same thing than a Kelvin Temperature correction (just a different user interface with fixed points named with the scenario itself rather than more abstract Temp values).

Now would you also agree that the desired WB correction you get when using "Sunny" - "Cloudy" - "Shadow" etc can also be achieved by setting the equivalent Kelvin temp? Thats what I stated in my first post...

Then GComm_Osmo confused me even more with his second post talking about artifical and multiple light sources in one scenario. Multiple Different light sources in one setup usually will never be correctable via any WB mechanism while its usually unevenly spreaded and thus every pixel requires a dedicated WB correction. Thats what my second post was trying to explain, unfortunatly misleading you guys...

But now I guess what I should have understood is not the multiple lightsources in one setting, but artificial light situations just as with greenish fluorescent light. And indeed you cannot sufficiently fix that light situation via the Kelvin Temp slider (easy math issue: you cannot compensate a 3 dimensional (R-G-B) messed up system with one two-dimensional slider (Kelvin is more for balancing between Red and Blue and cannot just reduce green for instance). Thats why in famous Photoshop RAW-Konverter you find a Kelvin Temp slider AND green - magenta correction slider as a third correction parameter.
Another user interface representation would be the desired "custom" WB mechanism when selecting pixels you shot from a dedicated grey card. Then the SW knows that these pixels should have identical RGB values and can easily calculate the desired correction factors for each color (and thus make white white). But the correction mechanism would still be the same: applying correction factors for the RGB values... Just for clarification: the artificial light issue has nothing to do with continuous or rather discrete light spectra of light sources such as the sun resp. LED. Its just about how that light influences the givven RGB values of the camera (as defined by the sensors color sensitivity, quality of Bayer-Pattern and other applied optics etc) and requiring a third parameter (in addition to Kelvin Temp) when compensating all possible WB drifts.
While being confused I did ask that question in the end of my second post (WB compensation outside the Kelvin Temp range)...

To wrap it up: I obviously misunderstood GComm_Osmos initial request for additional WB mechanisms because I focussed on the "Sunny" - "Cloudy" - "Shadow" thing. What he meant was artifical light situations that cannot be compensated by just Kelvin Temp based WB, which is true. And in the middle I had an even more confusing topic on multiple different lightsources going on


@ Jeff:
"dialing Kelvin only let's you warm or cool the image but assumes the light you're dealing with is fairly consistent across the entire spectrum - which anyone who's shot with fluorescents or LEDs will tell you isn't true.. A custom white balance will pull the RGB curves into line so that white is white, or neutral grey is neutral, or whatever."

While obviously I am getting famous for misinterpretation - every adjustment of warm or cool is also nothing else but balancing RGB curves as well, but not every white balancing is only about warm and cold?!

I hope that now we really are on the same page, are we?
Then - finally - we will be able to finish this longly discussion. Was nice chatting with all you anyhow

Enjoy your WE



2016-1-9
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jeff_kirkland
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Australia
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@Martin, it all sounds about right to me. My page is your page. :-). Fingers crossed the DJI engineers decide it's a feature worth having.

For a point and shoot camera like the X3, I'm happy with what's there, but I imagine the sorts of people laying down some serious cash for the X5 will have much higher expectations in terms of the DJI Go app's features.

Cheers
Jeff K
2016-1-9
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Casey Preston
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Regarding the X5, right now the manual kelvin selection isn't even accurate.  Kelvin selection appears to have more of an effect on the tint rather than the actual white balance.
2016-1-10
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michael.finlays
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I third this.  Well put and thorough. You know, professional!
Edit:
Haha, I added this after the FIRST comment and it put it at the end of a long thread. I was saying I want:

1. The "standard" custom setting to lock in a value by focusing on a white card, and/or
2. The ability to use auto to get a good sheeting and then lock it.

As the OP said, feature #1 has been on the last four generations of cameras I have used.

M

2016-1-17
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stylianos.photo
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Greece
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Hi. P3P owner. Pro photographer. This grey card point - shoot - custom wb is a must...
Dji engineers must give us that.
thanks.
2016-3-22
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pgp101
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Flight distance : 113094 ft

France
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Yes, we need proper *custom* white balance. Being able to set the Kelvin temperature is nice, but it was of no help at all in this indoor go-kart arena lit by fluorescent ("Neon") lights. The video had a nasty green tint when WB was set to "fluorescent". All other presets gave a super warm image. This frame grab is the AUTO WB setting. Other cameras (iphone, DSLR) did just fine, the tarmac was a beautifully neutral grey.
DJI, please give us both a matrix with Amber-Blue/Green-Magenta for proper white balance tuning, AND also the super-important custom WB feature where you shoot a grey chart / neutral object and you're good to go. Shooting RAW video is not even an option for me, too much time-consuming. I want to get the colors right during shooting, like I do on my 5D mkII.
cap 2016-04-16 à 03.08.40.jpg
2016-4-15
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DJI-Adela
DJI team

Hong Kong
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Hi, everyone
We would keep reviewing your suggestions, thanks for all of your attentions!  
2016-4-15
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ariajalali
lvl.1

United States
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so did anything ever happen with this? still not an option?
2016-5-25
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LagunaHiker
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United States
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I'd like to add my voice in support of a white/gray card option for setting white-balance.

We can debate the technical ins and outs until hell freezes over, but the fact remains that, among professional photographers and videographers, shooting a white-balance target is a must. At present, I am shooting a white-gray-black target at the beginning of each flight, so that I can adjust exposure and white-balance in post. However, that doesn't always work if I leave WB set to auto, because the camera changes the white balance setting as the lighting changes. So, I end up with color drift, which means I spend more time color-grading.

At present, I am compromising by setting the Kelvin value to an approximation of the light under which I am shooting, since that seems to at least lock the WB. But my life would be easier if I could simply shoot a WB target and lock the WB value on the camera's reading from that target. It's an elementary and standard element of and pro video camera.
2016-10-9
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TwinCityAerial
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I am new to all this and was watching a Youtube video on setting white balance manually which told me about the white balance card method, when I tried doing this on the Osmo X5 I could not figure it out and searched the internet which led me here. I did spend a lot of money on my Osmo setup and it sucks that the DJI GO app will not allow this. I did hold a white balance card in front of the camera in auto white balance mode and watched the # that it was giving me and then set it to that number in the manual settings. I have no idea if this was a way of setting the white balance but I didn't know what else to do. I suppose DJI will not deal with this issue since they have the new Inspire 2 cameras out now.
2017-3-7
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EofA
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United States
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Ugh... looks like everyone else is having the same issue. I've been using the X3 Pro for about a year now. Can't stand that I can't get a solid white balance at my video shoots. It's hit or miss with color grading.

When was the last update to firmware anyway? Have they stopped development of the App?
2018-2-7
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fans03a51f39
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United States
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And still no custom white balance in the Action 4, only kelvin.
2023-11-15
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