White Balance question

Yes, it does its own white balance and ignores the camera setting.

After all, the whole point of shooting in RAW is to *not* have the camera set the white balance. If you like what the camera does, use JPEG.

Keith is right in principle -- I'm not sure he's 100% right in practice. If you search this forum and the Web you'll find that some people report that Aperture uses some of the WB information in the metadata to render the Image (Canon), while others report (as Keith states) that Aperture does not.

I don't know. I always use AWB. I record only RAW files. The WB I see in Aperture is usually excellent (so much so that I stopped using gray cards and my X-Rite Passport). But for sunsets and sunrise, and red flowers, the WB is far from what I want.

I treat WB as an artistic decision. Most people's vision is so far from purely ocular that rendering things as they look to a light recording device is not desirable.

Here are links to articles I found very useful when I was puzzling this out:

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.htm

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/products/photoshop /pdfs/understanding_digitalrawcapture.pdf

I just looked through my Canon 5D MKII raw pictures - no sunrise pictures unfortunately. The closest I could get, is this record from our recent experiments, nothing artistic:

But I noticed that the recent raw update treats the white balance settings differently for the Canon from previous raw support versions. The screenshot above shows the original image, taken last year, with a warning that the raw support has changed, and if I want to reprocess. The image to the right is the same image after reprocessing, and it has a slightly blue-green tint after reprocessing the raw.