SonyA580 wrote:
If I'm not mistaken the white balance setting is disabled when shooting RAW. You can change it to suit your taste is PP.
No, it's not disabled. But, yes, you can easily change WB when you shoot RAW.
First, it sounds as if you are getting reasonably accurate feedback because you're using a calibrated, high quality computer monitor. That's good.
Most likely, it's settings of your camera that are incorrect. Skin tones in portraits are especially susceptible to any skewed settings.
Get into your camera's menu and check that your 7D is set to "Faithful" Picture Style. It might be set to to something that renders a more vivid image. I don't use "Portrait" Picture Style because all it does is reduce sharpening, which I can do to taste more accurately in post-processing rather than in-camera. But if you prefer, that could be used too.
While still on the screen that sets Picture Style, press the Info button to open and display the various parameters of that particular style, which you can adjust to taste. Those are pretty self-explanatory. For now, I'd leave them zeroed out. Later you might want to tweak some of them. Alternatively, not sure about 7D, but on my 7D Mark IIs I have option to set up as many as three "user defined" custom Picture Styles. (Another way to choose and tweak these settings is with the camera tethered to your computer and Canon's Picture Style Editor app, if you have it installed.)
Next, go into the menu and open the WB Shift/Bkt. (bracket) screen... to make sure that's set to zero, too. (I've had this mysteriously get set on a camera once or twice, causing all images made with it to be skewed. I didn't set it, that I recall... and was baffled for a while, why one camera was making magenta tinted images while another identical camera I was using alongside it was rendering neutral images.)
The next thing to do is set a Custom White Balance under your particular lighting set up. This is done by photographing a white balance target under the lights, making an image which the camera then uses to establish the WB. This is MUCH more accurate than using any of the presets such as "Flash", "Daylight", "Shade", etc.... And also a lot better than using Auto WB. It's even better than setting the WB manually.... because that only effects the color temp (the cyan/yellow axis), doesn't set the color tint (magenta/green axis).
For much of my shooting I use a Lastolite EZ Balance target. Those fold up for storage, which I like.... and provide a neutral white on one side, neutral 18% gray on the other. I use the gray side because it allows me to also check the accuracy of my exposure settings, at the same time I'm setting the Custom WB.
HOWEVER, strobe and flash light often tends to be a little too bluish or "cool" for portraiture. For that type of photography, I use Warm Cards as a target to set my Custom WB. Those are sold in a set that includes a couple with light blue tint that causes the camera to skew the Custom WB toward a slightly warmer rendition, which usually looks better for portraits. (Note: The Warm Card set also has pure white, neutral gray, two cooling cards and one or two especially for fluorescent lighting.)
Of course, shooting RAW you can still make changes to all these things.... HOWEVER, the
preview images you see when you play back the image on the camera's LCD (uncalibrated and influenced by ambient lighting, so not very reliable to judge color rendition or exposure accuracy) are effected by WB, Picture Style and other settings of the camera. AND, those preview images are also what you see on your computer screen initially, when you're working with the images in post-processing software. All PP s'ware I'm aware of "honors" the color temp and tint as rendered in-camera, even with RAW images (in-camera or in-computer, you're never viewing RAW directly.... that's not possible... only a preview is shown until you've converted the RAW to a usable image file type).
Unlike most other settings such as sharpening, noise reduction, etc., that's what's shown and if you let it the s'ware will use whatever color temp and tint were recorded when the image was captured. This is what you are seeing in your images, I suspect... and using the above adjustments to Picture Style and Custom White Balance, as well as making sure no WB Shift is dialed in, you should be able to get your out-of-camera image previews much closer to what you want (and still be able to change them in PP, if needed).
Finally, because you mention a yellow color cast, double check that you aren't under-exposing. You're probably aware, when that happens, images tend to look a little yellow and "muddy".
Hope this helps!