problem with white balance in develop persona

[Old Bruce]

The Neutral Grey Card has been a photography standard from... decades and decades back. For setting exposure at first, and then with colour film being invented it was used to get correct colours. The key is Neutral. Hard to find in real life.

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, Old Bruce said:

The Neutral Grey Card has been a photography standard from... decades and decades back. For setting exposure at first, and then with colour film being invented it was used to get correct colours. The key is Neutral. Hard to find in real life.

Yes, that's true. But Affinity Photo provides White Point pickers.

[Old Bruce]

Neutral Grey is just a dark Neutral White. Two or three stops of exposure difference.

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Neutral Grey is just a dark Neutral White. Two or three stops of exposure difference.

I think you still need to click on something that should be pure white, in order for the White Point pickers in Affinity to work properly.

[Keyseeker]

Does the same thing, board behind is white and the picker turns the image warm (the picker shouldn't work on white as that area could just be blown out like a specular highlight). Adobe will warn you to choose an area that is not white. Maybe I am missing something here but all other software(Gimp, PS and other) will set the selected area to neutral without changing the luminosity value of the pixel (gray stays gray, red becomes gray at the same luminosity of the original red). Clicking on white (255,255,255) would be useless.

[walt.farrell]

20 minutes ago, Keyseeker said:

Adobe will warn you to choose an area that is not white

But aren't you doing a gray balance, not a white balance, in the other applications? (Just like their Curves or Levels dialogs have White, Gray, and Black pickers?) According to the Help, that picker in Affinity Photo is for picking White.

[Ron P.]

39 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I think you still need to click on something that should be pure white, in order for the White Point pickers in Affinity to work properly.

From a great tutorial provider DrippyCat, by clicking on an object in your image, you're assuming  that it is white, when it could be a shade, not really white. That's why we (photographers) like those Grey or White cards. I've used a sheet of paper that I knew was white, or some object I knew for certain was white, and shot a picture of it to use for setting white balance.

The Gray cards are for exposure. The exposure meters in cameras, meter everything for 18% grey.

[David in Яuislip]

2 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Neutral Grey is just a dark Neutral White

Love it, I'm going to write that down. If I am fussy about colour balance I put a grey card in the frame, well it's a posh plastic passport but it's much the same thing. Never used it for exposure cos I used an Invercone

[rikkarlo]

I don't think you are supposed to click on a white area. If it was like you said the colours should be shifted in a way that the particular pixel you selected becomes white (255 255 255), and it does not do it either. So even if you are right (which I think you are not, I'll explain why below) this tool is not working like that either.

My guess is that the tool is bugged, because it works properly in raw files (by clicking on a white or grey area), but it does a different thing in jpgs, in raws you click on any white/grey area and it makes that particular pixel of a neutral grey (no warm, no cold dominance in the colour, just flat grey with 3 equal rgb values, which is exaclty how the same tool in competitor applications works). The problem is that for jpg it only moves the temperature slider alone leaving the tint slider fixed (the "temperature" slider changes name from raws to jpgs and becomes "white balance" slider, which I don't understand the reason for this choice either... I guess this is the reason why who programmed it changed the behaviour for jpgs), while when working with raw it actually moves both of them, my best bet is that they just forgot to consider the second slider for jpgs in the script... Or maybe if it was an actual rational choice of the programmer that worked on it, maybe he didn't understand how the white balance works in every other software which is a bit worryng for a software that does photoediting.

What I find even odder is that this is a basic tool that any photographer would use on daily basis and I reported this bug more than one year ago, so I'm starting doubting that affinity photo is a tool that profesisonal are actually not using for professional works, if no one complained about that since then...

Just one last thing, if it was not for this minor thing I would have left the competitor software one year ago, because affinity is perfectly capable of doing all the rest fantastically,  but untill I'll be able to balance the white/grey with one click I'll really can't use it.

(PS: I've found a work around but it's cumbersome, you put a marker using the info panel on the point you want to white balance, then you use the white balance adjustment layer, you colour pick the same point, this operation will only move the white balance slider (which should be named temperature), then you move the tint slider manually untill the three RGB values on the info panel are equalized, note that if the difference between the RGB values is very high this method wont work anyway, but in most cases works.)

[Keyseeker]

I agree the problem also shows up in TIF...I now use Affinity  as my primary editor with the competitor's catalog program (as Affinity has no intention of creating one) which has a very good white balance tool to prepare the files for AP.

[NZezula]

I just want to say, that its problem is still here after a few years. 

To summarize, the white balance picker is functional only in the Develop Persona on RAW files. On JPG, PNG, TIFF(...) it is not working properly (moves only white balance and not tint. Which means that your picked area does not change to the neutral grey, but stays with some color tint)

This is not a small bug and I'm looking forward to the fix!

[walt.farrell]

17 minutes ago, NZezula said:

Which means that your picked area does not change to the neutral grey

The way that tool works, is that you find an area of the image that is supposed to be white (not neutral gray) and click on it. So it certainly shouldn't be changing to a neutral gray in any circumstances.

Help: https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/pages/Adjustments/adjustment_whiteBalance.html

Quote

Picker—allows you to sample the image to set the white point on which the white balance will be calculated.

The Picker is in the Photo Persona, but the Develop Persona has a White Point Tool that operates the same way.

[rikkarlo]

EDIT: read below

[rikkarlo]

On 11/28/2021 at 8:03 PM, rikkarlo said:

I don't think you are supposed to click on a white area. If it was like you said the colours should be shifted in a way that the particular pixel you selected becomes white (255 255 255), and it does not do it either. So even if you are right (which I think you are not, I'll explain why below) this tool is not working like that either.

My guess is that the tool is bugged, because it works properly in raw files (by clicking on a white or grey area), but it does a different thing in jpgs, in raws you click on any white/grey area and it makes that particular pixel of a neutral grey (no warm, no cold dominance in the colour, just flat grey with 3 equal rgb values, which is exaclty how the same tool in competitor applications works). The problem is that for jpg it only moves the temperature slider alone leaving the tint slider fixed (the "temperature" slider changes name from raws to jpgs and becomes "white balance" slider, which I don't understand the reason for this choice either... I guess this is the reason why who programmed it changed the behaviour for jpgs), while when working with raw it actually moves both of them, my best bet is that they just forgot to consider the second slider for jpgs in the script... Or maybe if it was an actual rational choice of the programmer that worked on it, maybe he didn't understand how the white balance works in every other software which is a bit worryng for a software that does photoediting.

What I find even odder is that this is a basic tool that any photographer would use on daily basis and I reported this bug more than one year ago, so I'm starting doubting that affinity photo is a tool that profesisonal are actually not using for professional works, if no one complained about that since then...

Just one last thing, if it was not for this minor thing I would have left the competitor software one year ago, because affinity is perfectly capable of doing all the rest fantastically,  but untill I'll be able to balance the white/grey with one click I'll really can't use it.

(PS: I've found a work around but it's cumbersome, you put a marker using the info panel on the point you want to white balance, then you use the white balance adjustment layer, you colour pick the same point, this operation will only move the white balance slider (which should be named temperature), then you move the tint slider manually untill the three RGB values on the info panel are equalized, note that if the difference between the RGB values is very high this method wont work anyway, but in most cases works.)

what about this? you never answered this, maybe I'm still missing something

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, rikkarlo said:

what about this? you never answered this, maybe I'm still missing something

Good question. Sorry, I don't have an answer at this point.

[NZezula]

4 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

The way that tool works, is that you find an area of the image that is supposed to be white (not neutral gray) and click on it. So it certainly shouldn't be changing to a neutral gray in any circumstances.

Help: https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/pages/Adjustments/adjustment_whiteBalance.html

The Picker is in the Photo Persona, but the Develop Persona has a White Point Tool that operates the same way.

sorry, but let's agree to disagree... every other white balance picker in every other photo software on market works like I just said. Btw proof is that in RAW it works just like it should be. so it is definitely bug

[NZezula]

I just want to say that I have opened the same topic on the V2 forum... sadly the problem still prevails 

 

[rikkarlo]

1 hour ago, NZezula said:

I just want to say that I have opened the same topic on the V2 forum... sadly the problem still prevails 

 

Thanks for your interest, I'm still waiting for this bug to be fixed as well... Until it's not fixed I can not really use only Affinity as my main photo editing tool :(. Pity because all the other feature are on point.