White Balance multiplier in RawTherapee

I have a question about White Balance in RT. I shot this image with the WB manually selected at 6300k. When I open in RT, it shows 6692k when ‘Camera’ Method is selected. Why is this, and what is the purpose of the Multipliers? I’d look this up in RawPedia right now but it seems to be down. TIA.

Screenshot 2024-11-03 090142

You should give some details about the camera and the RT version. It looks like your camera is not fully supported in your RT version.

What does the metadata say for WB in your file…

RT 5.11, Fuji X-T4.

Here’s a screenshot when I look at it in RT’s EXIF viewer:

image

I have an Olympus em10-ii and an em5-iii. They both exhibit that sort of behaviour, that is the RT colour temp doesn’t match what the camera thought it was. And this is not just RT 5.11. I’ve been meaning to ask about it but @Rick beat me to it. (I’ve been procrastinating a long time.)

So the mulitpliers used look correct from those data… and I think that is what is used to correct the data so the results should be correct… At least that is how I interpret it…

Essentially, there is no exact way to represent white balance with temperature and tint because tint does not correspond to something that exists physically. The temperature will be different slightly compared to other software. The difference is typically more pronounced the more tint there is (when the value for tint is far away from 1).

Multipliers is another way to represent white balance instead of using temperature and tint.

What you see in editing software (and the camera, for that matter) is just the interface. Real whitebalancing is clever channel mixing under the hood and it’s easier to present the user with terms like “Daylight”, “Cloudy”, “Shade” or even Kelvin scale, than channel multipliers :wink:

So the same photo shows different numbers of “Temperature” and “Tint” in software A, in software B, C and so on. It depends on the approach how the app converts real channel mixing data to user-friendly names.

Read this link by JdC ->Research and development - White-Balance: auto -temperature correlation: