White Balance Setting on DSLR

On a bright day (not necessarily sunny), what would be your white balance setting on a DSLR? Would you set it to AWB and let the camera sensor decide? or would you rather manually set it to Sunny? If so, why?

Of course if you shoot RAW, then it doesn't really matter does it since you can correct the shoot setting during post processing anyway ...

KK:

I usually shoot raw so it doesn't matter. Before I started shooting raw I tended to set my D60 on cloudy for white balance--especially for sunsets. At sunset, the images were typically too cool when set on AWB.

I think it depends on the dslr you are using. I shoot with the Nikon D-100 in jpeg all the time, and except when using the sb-80dx indoors I shoot with the WB setting of Cloudy-3. This setting gives me warm colors without any noticeable color cast and to me makes the picture look pretty close to what I saw. You can also pre-set the white balance using a grey card as well.

Rocky Sharwell wrote:I usually shoot raw so it doesn't matter. At sunset, the images were typically too cool when set on AWB.

Actually, this is not true for either Nikon or Canon. The WB on RAW does matter.

If you set the WB to where it should be and I am recording a bright red, I might get a 200, 80, 80 value. If I were to set the WB too warm, I might get a 255, 80, 80 value and end up with a clipped channel. This is not recoverable within the software by adjusting the WB in post production. And it's worse if you clip two channels instead of just one because now you can't tell which on should have been higher.

Sunsets are good examples. To get the truest colors, I would shoot with a WB between 3000 and 4000. Then in post production, I change the WB to between 5200 and 5600 while making sure I don't blow any channels.

That's one of the reasons I'm looking forward to the D2H. It's auto WB is suppose to be able to handle the lower Kelvin range well.