White balance and jpeg

[ggbutcher (Glenn Butcher)]

Either, depending on the software. They need to be applied before the image data is tone-mapped to something other than its linear relationship.

I recently did just this experiment, for another thread:

Applying WB to jpg/tiff in darktable and RawTherapee

So I did some messing around in rawproc with this, because I built it with such experiments in mind. What I came to is, you can correct white balance just about anywhere in the processing chain, but the “as-shot” white balance multipliers need to be applied before the image is scaled to display white, while there’s still room for the multiplication. I opened my test raw, applied the default raw tools, and deleted the white balance operator: [whitebalance-exercise1] A couple of explanation…