Hi,
I'm wondering about the usefulness of the Liveview display on Olympus DSLRs.
Specifically for taking pics of art in a gallery under halogen lighting in order to view the colour/white balance.
Does anyone have experience of this - any suggestions? - is it a waste of time?
Is it only Olympus who do low end DSLRs with this feature?
(Don't want to spend more than £500 incl. lens).
Live view will not help you to judge white balance. The problem is with your eyes not the camera. We humans see color in a relative way. This is an advantage because we see objects as not changing color as the sun moves across the sky we see white as white no mater what light it is in (within limits)
I seriously doubt that the live view has been run through the camera image processor and corrected for WB. I'm pretty sure the live view is not a full resolution image. But even it if WAS processed you and your eyes are in the room with those lights and your eyes are adustd to see color under those lights so you could not be a good judge because it woud always look OK.
If yu want get the white balance "correct" the proper technique is to shoot a grey card. Some cameras can set their WB based on a test shot of a known nuetral object but if your camera lacks this feature you can do the same thing in post processing. You adjust the grey card exposure and then apply that adjustment to the real subject. It works flawlessly if the grey card and real subject are in the same light.
There are only a few uses of live view on an SLR
- Marketing to people who are used to P&S camera
- Shootting in some akward possition where you can't get your eye to theview finder
- Shooting with an underwater housing where the combination ofthe housing and the dive mask makes it hard to get your eye close to the view finder
