order of: WB and exposure adjustments

Software RawTherapee
1

simply im asking which should come first?
i would think at first thought exposure should.
thanks

2

I’m not sure there is a super correct answer, but I generally do exposure, then white balance, and if necessary, tweak the two in tandem.

3

thanks
ill experiment

4

In fact, as long as they are applied to the linear RGB data in the camera color space, the order doesn’t matter. Both are multiplicative adjustments that commute, i.e. the result does not change if the order is swapped.

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5

We covered this yesterday, have you not read the article?

6

thank you carmelo

yes i read the article. i have not yet absorbed every detail nor committed it to memory. i also dont recall discussing the order of operations in that thread you referenced.

7

RT uses a fixed order for the operations, not controllable by the user. so, you can apply them in any order you find more convenient, the results will not change.

8

thank you

9

that article was very useful in general. thanks for the suggestion morgan

10

Start off by clicking on the Color tab and expanding the White Balance tool (…)
Next, fix the exposure (…)
(…)
The order of the tools inside RawTherapee’s engine pipeline is hard-coded, so from that point of view it does not matter when you enable or disable a tool. However some tools can make a large impact on other tools, e.g. changing exposure may require you to re-adjust color toning, and some tools may require plenty of CPU power to calculate the preview making updates of the preview from then on slow, so it is for this reason we suggest you stick to this general order of operations: (…)

I must turn that into a video at some point…

11

thank you