How to White Balance a Focus Merged image.

[GvdBroek]

I take a test shot of a white card before before taking images for my focus stacks, so I know the correct color temperature value required to white balance my images. Once I've focus stacked my images, I can't enter a color temperature in K, I can only adjust as a percentage. That's not accurate.

If I take my RAW image which is around 27MB and make the adjustment on the individual image and save it, I have a 169MB image. With a large stack, this is a lot of work and takes up a lot of disk space.

So my question is, is there an easy way to apply a know color temperature (in degrees Kelvin) across a group of photos before merging, or to the finished merged image?

[stokerg]

Hi @GvdBroek and Welcome to the Forums,

I can't see a better way to do this.  We get the option of setting the white balance in K when working with a RAW file in the Develop Persona.  Once thats been Developed the White Balance adjustment uses a percent scale.

You could possibly use a 3rd party app like the free app Darktable which would allow you to set the white balance across multiple images and then you could do the focus staking in Affinity.

[Ldina]

@GvdBroek It's been a while since I did any focus stacking. As I recall, you always end up with bitmaps images in your stack (I think that's right).

Anyway, one approach is to create a Macro that sets your WB to your known value. Use that Macro to run a New Batch Job and export to the desired file format and size. If you want to keep file sizes small, you could try exporting the batch files to JPEG at about 85% quality (which is very high quality), then focus stack your JPEGs. You won't be working in RAW anymore, but you wouldn't when focus stacking anyway (if my fuzzy brain remembers correctly). 

The batch job runs fast and all your exported batch files will have the same WB/Tint. Saves a lot of time and file size.