Thank you again for this beautiful demonstration. Only regret, however, that the third retouched photos is no longer available for download on the signatureedits.com
I didnât see the second one either. Is it there?
Very good as usual, thanks!
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Thanks Pascal!
By the way, I am very excited about âprimariesâ module/sigmoid extension from @flannelhead . I would like to present it in the next episode. It would fit the topic very well.
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Boris, I have a question regarding white balancing. How is this best done? In your videos you often use the area picker in Color Calibration but the default often creates another color cast and you have to adjust chroma or chose a smaller area which is âgrayishâ. But, I guess, you do these adjustments until you think the image has neutral grays or (if absent) has sort of a natural look and is free of a color cast. Mostly personal judgement, right? Or are you also looking at other things like the histogram or vectorscope?
I suspect the answer might be that he is happy overall with a very neutral image based on a selection of the entire image. And in the case of most examples in the videos this works because he is doing a full color grade. When itâs a bit more about the warmth or look if I recall then you can see him toggle to custom to adjust that result. I will often take the full image as a sample and trust pretty much the hue and then make an adjustment to the chroma to add more or take some correction away. I usually find it looks overly neutral so I just pull back the chroma slider a little bit ⌠okay letâs see what Boris says and how wrong I am 
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In my opinion, the white balance is always subjective. Unless you use color checker for the scene. But even then you canât be sure that you have correct values, especially in the scene with different light conditions.
Chromatic Adaptation Transformation (CAT) in color calibration module actually makes pretty good estimation adapted to perception, so that the photo has a pretty âneutralâ starting point as far as color balance is concerned.
But this does not mean that the white balance is correct. For example, a scene illuminated by the evening sun will be rather âbluishâ to compensate for orange-yellowish color cast of the scene.
Nevertheless, this is a good starting position, because then you can clearly see the colors that were previously âcoveredâ by the color cast.
In this example, you canât see the face colors:
With white balance you have lost the warm illumination and the photo is now much colder than in the scene but you can see the color composition much better. Face color appears now.
With hue and chroma sliders you can then adjust the white balance to the lighting of the scene, so that the color mood of the scene is reproduced without losing the color composition:
And as you can see, in this case there can be no neutral gray, because the light source is colored. This would also not be possible in the shadows because the surface is always âcoloredâ by the reflections. And that must be taken into account.
Here is the final result compared to the internal camera jpeg:
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Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.
I actually watched again the video from Aurelien when he introduced the Color Calibration module (V3.4 of dt). In the module, the color patch left to the area picker shows the color of the illuminant. Something which may help with white balancing if you remember the lightning of the scene, at least roughly. It shows nicely in your example: the white in your first image is clearly off for a sun set image, but after white balancing it seemed to get closer to an evening sun lit scene.
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I think some landscape images and street scenes often donât seem to fit with any of the established colour harmonies, and you get a splodge of colours in the middle of the vectorscope. This can be quite challenging, but in fact itâs completely natural. After all, real life doesnât always harmonize; it can be chaotic and ever-shifting. Imagine a street scene in downtown New York or Tokyo. There would be so many colours all over the place.
But the important point that Boris talked about is identifying what your main subject is and then deciding if surrounding colours can be shifted to harmonize with it. This could be as simple as split-toning for the highlights and shadows, or it could be a single subject of a certain colour with background elements tinted to harmonize with the main subject. But sometimes the chaos of the colour might be what you want to convey, and this is just as valid an approach for your art.
Sitting back, analyzing my images and deciding what approach I want to take is definitely something Iâm still working on. Sometimes the scene naturally suggests a direction, but other times you have to really think about what it is you like about the scene and what to do with it. After returning from a trip with a bunch of photos, some may be spectacular and need the full processing treatment, while other snapshots are really just for keeping as a record of that trip. In other words, not every photo needs to be a work of art!
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@s7habo : The new module ârgb primariesâ is now available in current master. Looking forward to a new episode 
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@Pascal_Obry , @flannelhead Yes, I have already seen it, and could hardly sleep because I had to play with it. 
An excellent thing! Thank you both!
The episode will come in a couple of days, since Iâm busy now.
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I had a few min last night. I took a lot of photos in Ireland with my phone. The pixel phones can have a look that often works but is often too cold or has a sort of blue cast. They are JPGs but still using the blue purity slider I was able to correct this nicely without a huge impact on the overall photo. Same with some shots of grass and plants⌠I think this will be very useful
I looked this new episode yesterday : awesome 
Merci beaucoup.
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Nice and thanks for introducing the new Primaries RGB module.
A side note, you may want to use the Duplicate module in the darkroom for duplicating the pictures (avoiding to go back to lighttable). Also, it is a nice way to compare multiple duplicates by just clicking on one of the duplicate image in the module.
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OMG I completely forgot we have this option. Thanks for reminding me!
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