Hi, I think my biggest issue in photography is getting the white balance right, especially when I edit photos long after taking them and no longer remember what the actual light and colors looked like. What are your approaches to getting the white balance right in situations like this?
DSCF7972.RAF (32.2 MB)
DSCF7972.RAF.xmp (14.4 KB)
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With a shot like this my answer is simple. The lighting is daylight. A WB of daylight should be correct unless there is something like a bushfire or some other particle in the atmosphere affecting the light.
I have a Canon and find auto WB set in camera for many shots works perfectly fine. So my default setting is as shot. I change it if necessary in editing.
I have my camera (Nikon) on auto-white balance. In daylight the camera is almost always right. So I set most of the time set it from camera, works almost always.
I rare case I add a second color calibration module or some even the color correct tool.
Here is a second edit trying to put more drama in the sky.
DSCF7972.RAF.xmp (49.5 KB)
I think you did a great job with the colours here!
My approach for WB/Color grading is that I don’t care how my eyes perceived it. I either opt to make the photo look pleasing to me or to try to convey the mood of the moment.
There is no obligation to stick to the illusion of objective truthful colours 
.
My edit from pixelpipe bottom to top:
And for fun with dt-spektrafilm (which blows my AgX Edit straight out of the water): Gold 200/Fuji Crystal paper, slight push, some print contrast, reduced halation and some lift from the tone curve).
Btw.: After resetting the history stack for spektrafilm-dt I notice that this photo IMHO benefits from the full crop. The smidge of shadow to the lower left helps focus the attention to the center.
Great shot 
!
Hi,
I used to let my camera on auto white balance until I watched this Sean Tucker video. Since then I fixed the WB to 5500K. And so far, it’s OK for me.
I tried several methods with pretty widely varying results. For picking an area in the White Balance, I got the “best” results by selecting the area of the largest snow capped mountain. But in the end, I decided the best course was to go with “As shot to reference” plus the Color Calibration module.
I probably overcooked my final image with FilmicRGB.
Very nice shot.
I follow a similar approach as @mino. WB & CC just have to give me a good starting point but then I go for a pleasing result even if colors do not represent the perceived ‘reality’.
Here I
I didn’t feel that any further color grading is needed.
DSCF7972.RAF.xmp (11.9 KB)
Just thinking out loud, but
No?
Yes.
Never thought of it that way but: Yes.
I remember Darktable Landscapes’ reason for blue tints in the distance is due to water vapour in the air. More distance, more blue
Right, light scattering through the air would also add a blueish tint.
Tried for fun this thing I saw on a recent video about cranking up saturation initially to expose the main color cast and correct that …then take away the saturation and color grade from there…so I sort of tried to follow this…
Also only used the tone eq as I didn’t like what the other tone mappers did to the sky…
I usually let the camera do the WB.
When editing I am using either:
For this picture, the glacier in the background is providing the colored area that should be white. So I ended up with this :
Lovely scene and welcome back!
I often do not remember the color of the scene when returning home. Even worse when years have passed me by.
At the moment I have a simple workflow - which by no means is good or better. I have no tone mapper active, switch of CC and set WB to ‘as shot’. And work on from there. Why I do so? Because I found myself bad at colors and wanted to experiment.
For this picture I did not change anything in the WB nor in CC. In de-mosaic I set capture sharpening on. De-noise + lens correction. Bit extra exposure.
I pulled down the brightest spot in de cloud + upped shades with tone equalizer. Some sharpening (sharpen+ contrast equalizer) and local contrast are applied. Then a simple color balance rgb. A frame. That’s it. When needed you may work from there. It was just a couple of minutes leading to… (not much different from your interpretation and others before)
I did not check for dust-bunnies…
I don’t trust my memory of how things looked like even hours later. If I really care about a picture I either shoot a grey card, or take a picture with my phone in pro mode and fiddle with white balance right then and there. Otherwise, it’s going to be picking a few objects and deciding which ones make the picture look the most normal.
Could be interesting to hear why you use CC for this purpose, rather than e.g. CB RGB or TE.
