A bit off-topic here but is there a reason why white balance bottoms out at 1900K? I’m doing some infrared photography at the moment and quite a lot of the time I’m hitting the bottom of the slider.
On that I would tend to agree. If adding a color scale forces a choice between irking one group of users or confuses another, then it would be best to leave things as they stand.
There is a vast difference between white balance and colour balance. Colour balance works in sRGB or ProphotoRGB, where blue channel “means” blue. White balance works in unbalanced sensor RGB, where blue channel means “that upper slice of the spectrum split by the sensor”. It holds no perceptual meaning whatsoever, and the first comment about it was the “blue” slider shifts the picture to magenta, which is telling it will not improve UX. More importantly, you will not be able to match sensor blue to display RGB.
There is simply no colour at this point of the pipeline. The only places where you can show colour is the temperature and tint, because you are able do derivate a chromaticity from black body temperature, and match it to display RBG, but that’s about it.
I think polynomial models matching the black body temperature to spectral emissions stop at 2800 K or something, then it’s another model that is used and that gets wonky pretty fast. But infrared photography is completely out of the scope of white balance, since the very definition of white (and all subsequent chromatic adaptation) applies in the visible locus.
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Maybe one for a separate thread: pretty much every tutorial for post-processing infrared starts with discussions of how to set the ‘white balance’. Of course, it’s not real white balance because, as you say, it’s not in the visible spectrum, but I don’t know what other tools to use as it’s a pretty niche subject.
Just use the RGB coeffs directly, forget about temperature, that’s all.
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Ok I’m still stuck with the ‘how’ but I’ll raise another thread
Here I am all alone with my gray sliders.
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Not any more!.. some thoughts -
- Aesthetically I think the colours are a step backwards, they seem like clutter to me.
- Harder to maintain code in future with colours added.
- These controls are very basic, do they really need colour to explain them? (or even confuse people) If someone is not sure what they do, it’s pretty obvious when you move a slider!
- A nice tidy-up would be to remove the dots under the left side of each slider which “zero” the slider. This is not relevant to white balance. But ok, perhaps it’s part of a standard widget so not practical.
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Vote on gray too, after reading AP’s reasoning (“there’s no color at this point”).
Besides, it kind of breaks the current aesthetic of almost no color present in the UI, although the added colors are subtle.
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Theoretically WB adjustments from what little I gathered recently “makes sense” between ~1677K and 25000K. I don’t really know if current white balance code can handle values below 1901K though (those are hardcoded).
Maybe a bit. But I’d rather have option to turn it on/off since ever enabling it helps me visually and “feels” right. Regardless whether temperature slider is blackbody radiation or fake lightroom-like 
And whether R/G/B sliders actually represent what they do in extreme ranges (in small adjustments they actually work as “expected”, shenenigans happen with extreme differences between coefficients). TBH it’s also true for all other sliders, meaning extreme “blue” will turn image magenta, extreme “green” will turn image yellow, extreme “red” will turn image pink/violet…
The solution to that might be similar to what @guille2306 suggested, eg “what would happen with white if it were to pass though pipe with those coefficients” That could create a bit more meaningful visual indication.
Or go with “those are just coefficients, so numbers, not colors. as in ‘patch size’ not something you have color for!” 
To each his own regarding aesthetics, but seriously this is kind of visual guide that actually helps me. I do enable/disable it via option, so it isn’t as with lightroom options of “get f*** if you want to change something” 
And honestly that adds very tiny amount of clearly separated code.
All sliders can be done that way though. But that isn’t good UX at all. Hell, I personally don’t want to move any slider that has no color/tooltip.
To quote some comedy scene (so nobody gets offended, it’s a quote): “You Bastard! You complete absolute bastard!”. Thanks. I hate it.
Now I see it EVERYWHERE and hardly anywhere is it “right”. In color balance it’s mostly right, in tone equalizer, simple tab it’s totally right, but masking tab has it (imho) a bit wrong, exposure has it wrong on cliupping threshold, highlight reconstruction has it wrong, white balance has it wrong everywhere, local contrast has it wrong everywhere, sharpen has it wrong everywhere, haze removal has it partially right… AAAaaarght!!! And I’m yet to check what it should do/show/indicate and your remark alone made me question it on every slier!
How about color for temperature of illuminant + tint? Those do have color at that point though!
Never even noticed those were there
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It’s fine to me, but I keep my vote to gray as default.
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I put them there during the UI revamp, one year ago. The reason is some sliders have zero on the right, some on the left, and some in the middle. So having a dot to show you the zero give you that info immediately (and also, for “balanced” sliders with zero in the middle, you can feel the balance).
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THB those work for most part especially in balanced case, so thanks for them!
Can we set up that dot for sliders with no meaningful zero, or which can’t go to zero etc, to rather indicate “balance point”?
It’s zero if there is one, or minimum value in the range else. In this last case, it’s just to see which way decreases the parameter.
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Ah, but there’s the rub: a choice that looks and feels right to one group looks and feels wrong to another. I tend to look at this kind of thing pragmatically. In the end you’ll wind up with a never ending round of complaints and counter complaints.
Maybe there’s a grand comprise: have an option for all three! OTOH, that’ll probably just get everyone complaining… Life is just too short for that. 
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I was just looking in Preferences but can’t see anything like this, could you expand pls?
Put on dark glasses, sit down, have a drink! 
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Yes indeedy!! Color temperature was a thing in the captured scene; once it’s recorded it’s all about the R, G, and B channel alignment, that’s why it’s called ‘white balance’. Temp/tint in post is just a software abstraction of the concept to allow one to continue thinking of it in terms of the scene lighting. Me, I’ve never been able to make it work, much prefer RGB multipliers, looking at the histogram…
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+1 for colored sliders (where it makes sense)
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