I have a whole bunch of photos that stand together and I need to set the white balance manually for each photo. I set the wb manually in camera at 5150k for the whole set of photos but the actual/real world white balance changed quite a bit during the 1.5 hour of the event.
Never had to deal with this before.
Should I manually set my web in the white balance module or in the color calibration.
DT shows: wb: 5139k while the color calibration has a temperature of 4196k
What’s the difference between the white balance module vs color calibration module.
Pragmatic answer:
1.) leave white balance to as shot to reference and ignore it. Use colour calibration for all your white balancing needs.
2.) these figures are estimates and thus vary between different approaches to the same problem.
For a more thorough and technical explanation see here .
First, I would always cull first. Be brutal. The fewer images you have to edit, the easier this process will be.
If you are using one of the default scene referred workflows that uses both the white balance and color calibration module, then you shouldn’t have to touch the white balance module.
What I typically do is to split the photo set into sections based on their relative white balance, and then make corrections to each set of photos as a group. The distinguishing factor is typically capture time (earlier in the day vs later in the evening) or location (inside vs outside).
Example: Time based lighting changes
When I do outdoor photoshoots, I typically take several photos in one setting/scene, and then move a short distance to a different area, and so on. These location changes are typically where I would look for significant white balance changes, since the lighting does not usually change during the capturing of a single scene.
So I first cull all the images, and then look through the scenes for temperature outliers. Typically only the last images from the shoot need significant adjusting. I’ll pick one and adjust the temperature until it looks the way I want it to and then propagate that change to the other images in that set “off” images.
I then look over the group of offending images and see if the propagated white balance fixed the group or if there are any images (especially towards the end) that need extra fixing.
white balance is before input color profile and works on raw camera RGB multipliers. It estimates temperature using the D65-referenced camera matrix.
After input color profile, the pipeline uses a D50 white point. color calibration is after input color profile.
When we move from D65-referenced camera space to the D50-referenced working space, chromaticities (xy coordinates) are adapted: D65 xy → D50 xy, and all others move, too, including the scene illuminant. color calibration then shows a CCT estimate based on D50-adapted xy illuminant values.
So, nothing to worry about. You can ignore that number altogether.
Also, it’s only even meaningful when the illuminant is close to the planckian locus. For anything that’s not blackbody/daylight, it will very likely show (invalid) due to this.
That might be a good entrance test for new users… if your head doesn’t explode upon seeing the invalid warning then you might be a successful Darktable user.
The color calibration is disabled. When I enable it then I get the error message of the white balance module error but I do get better (more visually appealing colours).
If your lucky you might be able to use area color mapping to simplify the task. If the subject matter lends itself to this approach.
Get the color looking nice in the first edit. Then use the ‘measure’ option in area color mapping section of the color calibration module to measure the color of the scene. This will switch the target value for color from the neutral grey default to another color. Then the picker can be used in subsequent edits to aim for the same color.
This approach will work with some subjects but will not be suitable for all. It can also be used to target a skin tone or any color that can be found throughout the shoot. So if for instance there was a wall, road or any surface that was consistent throughout the shoot it could be used for the color match.
Sorry to say this isn’t an error. Really. It just says that. It’s fine.
The first choice, unless you have certain cameras that give a bad result, is to set white balance to “as shot to reference” and do the major editing in the color calibration module. This gets rid of the warning.
If this doesn’t look good, you can use white balance with or without color calibration. How to calibrate wb is something best left to past threads that have already explained it. But you only need to do that if you can’t get good colors otherwise, and it sounds like you don’t have that problem.
In color calibration, when using both, white balance must be on “camera reference” or “as shot to reference”
See above and: wb gives temp and tint which is a cheat (if tint != 1, the temperature is at best an approximation, probably just wrong). color calibration gives a temp, and when the illuminant isn’t daylight or black body radiation, it adds “(invalid)”, as such light cannot be reduced to a simple temperature.
See previous answers. Basically, the “proper” place for white balancing is at the colour calibration module, but most demosaicing algorithms need a decent white balance as well, so the “white balance” module was kept and is needed. Internally, both work the same (channel mixer)
Of course. I never said setting “white balance” to one of the two mentioned values was enough. Just that that’s what is needed for the setup to work as intended…
If you have a neutral grey patch in your images you can use the area color mapping function (see darktable user manual - color calibration) to adapt to such changes of illumination.
This is the most practical answer. Bruce Williams did a video about matching exposure and color (white balance) across shots. I used this to match a person’s skin color from a studio shot with controlled lighting to an outdoor shot taken with ambient light, for example.
This is weird. Are you sure you are NOT trying to change the white balance using the white balance module? If you are using darktable “correctly”, you should not get the error that white balance is applied twice. As others have mentioned, the correct setting for the white balance module is either camera reference or as-shot. The proper way to do white balance is using color calibration. My starting point is as-shot in camera.