kaffeeundsalz

And don't forget that all three apps will have a shared file format, so it'll remain possible to open the same Affinity document with Designer, Photo and Publisher. It would be very confusing if what's a canvas in designer would suddenly be called something else in Publisher, wouldn't it? As for terminology: Adobe InDesign uses the name "pasteboard" for the area outside of the active page area. I like the idea, but it's certainly a matter of taste.

I still feel greatly entertained. Gotta get some more popcorn though.

Maybe Serif should just give that guy a copy of their source code. Sounds like ready-to-run Linux versions of both Photo and Designer would just be a few easy compiling minutes away then! I literally can't wait!

Sure. Just go to Swatches and from the dropdown menu in the upper right corner of the panel, create a new palette. You basically have two options here: either choose "Add Document Palette", which will attach your color swatches to the currently active document. If you then open that document in your other Affinity app, the swatches will open with it. Or, for an even more global approach, choose "Add System Palette". This will allow you to create a system-wide set of swatches that are permanently accessible from both Affinity Photo and Designer. And since system palettes are also not document-based, you'll have them available in any file you create or open.

Just because something can be considered doesn't mean it's necessary. You might trick less experienced people to believe they have to know all of this stuff to master a simple white balance adjustment.

@owenr Certainly I did! I saw it, but you said "It is far from a perfect fix for this photo", so I thought you could provide one. I was just curious what the result would look like. But if you say you'd never be satisfied, I can understand that. Never mind then.

@R C-R, I think our opinions are closer to each other than you think, but it's amazing how you don't seem to understand what I'm saying over and over again. Maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker? If so, my apologies for not being able to express myself clear enough. But maybe it's because you always quote just some of my lines, so I wonder if you actually read my entire post. Right. Unless you think that the uncorrected original example of this thread has proper white balance. But I already said this. In most cases, yes. It depends on the look you want to achieve. But I already said this. In a way, all of them are (except for the unedited original image because that one has a clearly visible orange shift). It depends on the reference point you pick for white balancing. But I already said this. That might be because the images need further editing. Why don't you go and edit that image so that you're satisfied with the result and post it here? True. But "neutral color" is clearly defined in image editing. In RGB, it's when all three parameters R, G and B have the same value. In HSL/HSV, it's when S is 0. That's what you're white balancing against. Does it correctly reproduce colors of real world lightning? No. Is the perception of real world lightning subjective? Yes. Are there cases when neutral color values are not desirable at all in an image? Yes. But I already said this.

I didn't say that it has nothing to do with perception. I said that the degree of detail of your scientific approach is completely unnecessary to get to an image that is properly white-balanced. That's because, to stick with my example, if you remember an object to be white, you can make it appear white in the photo, too. Whether it actually has a different color from a physical or perceptional or divine perspective is totally insignificant because you already are where you want to be with your image. Or, in other words: White balance is surprisingly not about finding some universal truth about how we are all expected to perceive color. That would be the same as starting a discussion about the essence of being with someone who just asked for your ID.

@R C-R, you're getting way too theoretical here. Nothing you say about perception and brains and whatever has anything to do with what people actually intend to achieve with a white balance tool. What they want is to remove a color cast from an image because color casts look ugly (most of the time, they do). There are well-defined workflows to get there. None of these rely on your overly-scientific considerations. In fact, how can any perception of color be objective since we're talking about perception? If that's what you want to discuss, you're entirely missing the point.

I know. But when you only use the graypoint picker, you get the same or at least a similar result. That would only be the case if color was the only reference you have, e.g. in an abstract painting or so. If you have a landscape or a room or whatever scenery, you can tell from the objects that you're seeing what could be a good reference for a neutral color, even more so when you shot the image yourself and definitely know that, for example, some furniture on the photo is actually white in reality. Of course, this won't give you the appearance under the original lightning conditions because the light itself could have a color cast, but I think I already mentioned this and it's not what you're usually after when using the white balance tool (and if so, you'd have to rely on your eyes even more).

I must say that I'd find this pretty straightforward: You define an area of the image that, from what your eyes can tell, should be of neutral gray appearance, and the tool adjusts the overall color appearance of the image to match this. Right now, the white balance adjustment can't do this, at least not completely automatically. Of course, the quality of the result greatly depends on the actual lightning conditions at the place and time of the shot and the amount of color cast that is present in the image. Having used Photoshop's white, black and gray point pickers for years (which work as @owenr suggested), I can tell from my experience that it sometimes results in a really unnatural color cast itself, but is often pretty satisfying. So, as is true for every feature of image editing applications, it won't replace the judgement of your eyes. It's also true that a color cast isn't always equally distributed across the entire image. You might have a light source somewhere in your shot that gives objects a yellow tint only in, say, the lower right corner of the image. In that case, a graypoint picker can only be the first step since you need proper masking techniques to limit the effect to the area of the image that benefits from it. But that's already the case with how Photo's white balance adjustment works right now.

To be honest, it would definitely save time if you didn't have to manually mess with the Tint slider after you've corrected the color temperature with the picker. So yes, +1 for this.

But it would be great to have this as an option!

@Fotoloco, sorry for being so late with my answer. A slight loss in color intensity is actually expected with the method I suggested. That's because it's not the mathematically accurate way to separate frequencies, just something that comes pretty close. The good thing is that it's quite easy to accomplish. The tradeoff is that areas with high brightness or saturation values get muted quite a bit. I was hoping that the effect would be barely noticeable with your images, but since I don't know anything about the kind of material you're working with, I was actually just guessing. If you really wanted to do it the perfectly color accurate way, you'd need to do something like this: However, there are two problems with this approach: First, you don't start with High Pass filtering, but with blurring, and it can be really hard to tell what parameters to use because you don't get a nice preview of the high frequencies you're cutting off. Second, I have no idea if these equations can be modified in a way that the high frequency layer is perfectly grayscale. You'd possibly end up with the same problem you had before: losing color accuracy. By the way: All of this means that your solution of blending in the original layer with the blend mode set to color isn't that crude after all. It works because it modifies the colors of the frequency-separated layers so they match the hue (and saturation!) of the original image. Gonna have to try this myself!

I also never considered this to be a bug. A real graypoint picker that would allow for defining a point in the image that's supposed to be completely neutral and changes the image colors accordingly is, to my knowledge, not present in Affinity Photo. Adobe Photoshop has this feature, but it's for whatever reason buried inside the Levels dialog. A dedicated White Balance tool is missing in Photoshop, though it seems to be there in Photoshop Elements.