Color balance question

Morgan_Hardwood · August 28, 2017, 2:15pm

@agriggio is right, though I would say the most likely cause for the discrepancy is that different ICC profiles are being used, using different colormatrices and created based on targets shot in daylight where the exact temperature of the light was not the same.
Don’t focus on her skin or on the contrast in the photo. All you’re interested in is the hue of the background which you’re probably trying to get neutral.
Don’t rely on your eyes, use numbers. Open both images in a color-aware editor (e.g. RawTherapee) and sample the colors of the same area of the background, the a* and b* values should match and have a difference of about zero.
@Ajohn wrote, “The canon software will probably have used an ICC profile for the camera. RT doesn’t by default.” You don’t know what camera was used, so you don’t know that.
@Ajohn wrote, “An alternative is to use an Adobe one or one from somewhere else.” That would not help.
@Aleph a good starting point if you want to match white balance values in both programs is to use the same ICC profile in both programs. If there is still a discrepancy then that indicates that it lies elsewhere. Having said that, I don’t know with certainty whether raw white levels would have an affect - I would guess they do, and both programs are likely to be using different raw white levels.
The most important point is that doing this is pointless. It is irrelevant if the temperature and tint values don’t match across programs as long as setting the WB based on a neutral patch does in fact lead that patch to become neutral (works fine in RT).