That’s completely wrong and also this is the origin of the whole problem.
Many people are still confused that color is somehow related to temperature when it comes to white balance, even in the classical software and interface (just browse your average photo forum). So, as of now, either they built some practical notion of the temperature <=> color mapping (as some arbitrary amber-red → blue axis) with no understanding of the theory, or they had to learn how light spectrum correlates to temperature of a planckian radiator (whether they call it planckian radiator or not).
In this context, I don’t see how much worse it is to just warn about the wrongness of the temperature. There is no need for physics if you don’t want them, you only have 3 things to understand:
- if daylight-ish illuminant, then
color <=> temperature
by some physical law you don’t need to understand – just know there is a link, - if not daylight-ish illuminant, then color is whatever. Typical software offers
color <=> (temperature, tint)
but that is piling up shit on top of wrongness, so we simply offercolor <=> (hue, chroma)
with no further assumption – it’s robust and generic, - in our classical transparent way, we tell you if your illuminant is daylight-ish or not, and let you decide how you want to proceed from there.
That’s all.
A lot of photographers/artists/tech-shy people know when to use a polarizing filter and what it does to picture, yet very few of them understand the principle of filtering light waves depending on the orientation of their electric field. If you don’t understand it, you take the word as an arbitrary label, learn the result obtained with the technical apparatus labeled so, and learn how to control said apparatus to obtain said results.
Just because I strive to publicly expose the reasoning and the inner technicality doesn’t mean everyone has to go to M.Sc to use the thing. There are 2 use cases (daylight-ish or not), and a label that tells you which one you are in, just follow the recipe.
Besides, talking about color temperature without ever saying the name “illuminant” is also part of the misunderstanding, because the illuminant is the thing which (equivalent) temperature is measured. So people will have zero chance to understand what’s going on with temperature as long as they are prevented from conceptualizing a real-life object that is actually hot/emits radiations.