Whitebalance eyedropper which colour to choose?

[Buurew]

I regurarely do use the function of the eyedropper in order to adjust the whitebalance automatically when I think the colours have to be adjusted and I sometimes finetune, as a second step, the clolours manually with the aid of the sliders.

In the help file of ultimate 10 the function of the white balance is described.and here it gets a bit confusing for me. In develop mode you have to use a neutral grey colour and in Edit mode the help file describes to use white or grey. What is actually the best method or the way it should be?

Anyone who can clarify this subject a bit more to me?

[GusPanella]

With the white balance eye-dropper, you are basically selecting the color that --should-- represent a white or a gray. For example, lets say there is a portrait of someone wearing a white shirt and standing under a low pressure sodium lamp. These lamps cast a yellow hue. Thus the white t-shirt... and everything else in the picture will include photons that include that yellow hue. Selecting what really is a white or gray object in that image defines for ACDSee what is truly white. ACDSee analyzes the selection t decide on the hue that causes the shirt to look yellow. It then "subtracts" the hue (and the magnitude of the hue) from the entire image resulting in what should represent what the image would look like if it was taken with a pure white light.

[Buurew]

Thank you GusPanella.

So, I learned from your explanation that it does not have to be specifically white that you have to select but it also may be a gray.. The rest of the explanation is clear to me as well and I used my corrections in that way bearing in mind that the entire image will be corrected.

[GusPanella]

This is correct... any white or gray can be used for white balance.
There was a time when I use to take a picture of a white card (ice hockey rinks) in order to get a color correction reference for each event.