Color Can Be Tricky: Part IV

Camera white balance, RAW processors, and other stupid pet tricks

I use white balance presets like daylight, cloudy, and shade all the time in most cameras. It’s usually how I intend to render most outdoor scenes.

Quite some time ago I wrote a piece about why one might want to make sure the in-camera white balance is somewhere in the neighborhood of correct for the scene they are photographing. Let me revise that to an in-camera setting that represents somewhere close to the way they intend to render the final image. All of those thoughts were related to the fact that every camera I’ve owned or used uses the JPEG preview and the in-camera settings to render a histogram that many of us use for guidance in the field.

Last weekend I had with an experienced photographer regarding white balance, numbers, and RAW processors. I was surprised, even shocked, that he never noticed an extremely quirky characteristic regarding color and white balance that’s been inherent in today’s most popular RAW processing software -- Adobe Lightroom. This characteristic goes far beyond just Lightroom but many other RAW processors as well.