What type of white balance do you use for your nightscapes?

[gregbradley]

I've bee told you should use daylight for white balance setting on your DSLR for Milky Way nightscapes otherwise you get too many blue stars.

What have you found? I have not noticed too many images looking too blue but perhaps mine are showing too many blue stars in the Milky Way.

Greg.

[Atmos]

Although I usually just use the Auto White Balance but I do also do a white balance in PI like I would for any astro image. Sometimes there is a subtle improvement, sometimes not.

[RB]

Daylight.
But if you're shooting in Raw then it doesn't matter because you can change it.
I never use Auto WB.

RB

[Octane]

As Andrew said, if shooting RAW, it makes not one iota of difference.

You then have the ability to play afterwards in your RAW software.

H

[RB]

Hi five H.

:)

[Octane]

I've found daylight white balance gives varying results based on how dark the site is.

On my recent workshop in the Northern Territory, at Glen Helen, daylight white balance rendered quite a blue sky; at Uluru, it rendered a deep orange/red. In these situations, I select the colour temperature manually until I find something that's pretty much in between blue and red. Then, tweak it until it fits the motif of the image. :)

H

[RB]

True, I too prefer to manually set Colour Temp but usually when I don't want to muck around too much in post.
Lately I've been doing this with my drone footage too.
But if I'm going to do post work I find it simpler to just use Daylight WB, especially for nightscapes where stars are rendered closer to 'daylight' temp to start with and this gets me in the ballpark for the rest of the scene.

:)

[traveller]

I did a custom WB using a grey card as my DSLR was a full spectrum mod.
I also found my new CLS-CCD filter produced more faithful colours than other LP filters I used.
I have not used my DSLR without the CLS-CCD filter, so can't comment on that aspect.
Bo

[sil]

Daylight for stars to have accurate colours, but I don't do nightscapes, I shoot landscapes and I shoot sky, but not together. Nightscapes are effected by light pollution and it depends on the shot you take how you choose to process the white balance. Its a meaningless question, there is no rule for nightscapes since they can contain fluoros and sodiums and incandescents plus sky glow so you cant talk about accurate colours unless to define which part of a particular photo you are talking about.

[Octane]

But, there was no light pollution out in the NT (darkest skies I've ever seen!). :)

The quality of the sky still made a difference.

But, yes, in suburban skies, I guess it comes down to what looks best.

H

[gregbradley]

Thanks for the replies.

Sil I am talking in my case about a dark site with virtually no light pollution so its really only about what gives accurate star colours.

I get what you are saying H. That's interesting that it varies with some locations.

I used daylight white balance on a nightscape over the weekend and on the LCD screen it looked very good.

Greg