50D raw preview white balance

I have had my 50d for a couple of weeks (upgraded from a 20d) and am generally quite happy with the results.


I shoot only RAW, and find that the in-camera preview white
balance is usually WAY off when shooting flash indoors, with a very
high color temperature. I tried setting the camera WB to "flash", but
the camera seems to ignore WB settings and uses "auto" for the preview
image if you're shooting RAW-only. The same thing is visible when
viewing in ACR -- the color temp is very high, and it seems to have
ignored the camera WB setting. I would have expected the camera setting
to be recorded in the CR2 file and used as the 'as shot' value.



Can anyone shed some light on this? Is there a way to control the WB used for the raw preview if you're not making JPEGs?

The raw preview is a JPEG file that's automatically generated by the camera to speed up the review of the pictures you've taken. Therefore, I guess that it applies some automatic treatment to the images before they are converted, including applying a default white balance setting.


As you shoot in RAW, the white balance is entirely customizable in post-processing, so the auto-white balance applied on the preview images is an annoying feature at worst... If you customize your white balance with grey cards, you don't need to review your pictures for correct colors, as you have a reference picture if you think you need to tweak it afterwards.