3 ms·

I'm not the person you're responding to, but in my hobby experience it's sometimes the difference between a photo being fine or even great, and being completely

I'm not the person you're responding to, but in my hobby experience it's sometimes the difference between a photo being fine or even great, and being completely unusable. If the white balance is set wrong in-camera, then the JPG just came out all blue. It's effectively a black and white photo (albeit in shades of blue), and there's nothing to be done about it. Shot in RAW, the photo can be made color again, extremely easily and quickly. In fact it gets worse, not better, if you on the day try to adjust the white balance, as you go from outdoors to indoors. Not to mention if you change from flash and back. Auto is safer, but when it's wrong, the photo is unusable, and the moment is gone. But my DSLR is now over a decade old. Maybe "auto" has gotten much better? So yeah, for me the main thing is to be able to post facto adjust white balance, which JPG does not support. (if you've done it with both JPG and RAW, you know what I mean when I say "does not support")

strogonoff 1y ago
Right, I suppose shooting raw is good because you need to think less about your settings at shooting time. I will say that “auto” is pretty decent on the phones in most common lighting scenarios like sunlight/shade/outdoor/tungsten/fluorescent—white point is an entirely subjective thing that cannot be reliably determined automatically, so in my experience you rarely get the correct rendition of, say, bright pink clouds at sunset, or a book with pink pages (the phone would think it must be the some weird lighting that should be corrected for, because obviously a book can only have nearly white pages, right?), etc.—but due to physical limitations of sensor size and inferior optics the phone is worse than even a decade-old APS-C DSLR in most regards overall.
GrayShade 1y ago
I do think auto white balance is a little better these days. My old DSLR often had a strong magenta tint magenta in scenes with a lot of green (like forests). My new mirrorless camera from the same manufacturer no longer does that.

strogonoff 1y ago

Right, I suppose shooting raw is good because you need to think less about your settings at shooting time. I will say that “auto” is pretty decent on the phones in most common lighting scenarios like sunlight/shade/outdoor/tungsten/fluorescent—white point is an entirely subjective thing that cannot be reliably determined automatically, so in my experience you rarely get the correct rendition of, say, bright pink clouds at sunset, or a book with pink pages (the phone would think it must be the some weird lighting that should be corrected for, because obviously a book can only have nearly white pages, right?), etc.—but due to physical limitations of sensor size and inferior optics the phone is worse than even a decade-old APS-C DSLR in most regards overall.

GrayShade 1y ago

I do think auto white balance is a little better these days. My old DSLR often had a strong magenta tint magenta in scenes with a lot of green (like forests). My new mirrorless camera from the same manufacturer no longer does that.