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AP match white balance to another photo?


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Hi Mr. K,

 

The only way i could see to do this would be to set the white balance on one image manually, save that as a preset and then apply to it other images from the same shoot.  You could even record a Macro to do this and the apply that as part of a batch.  If you go that route, i'd suggest working on a backup of the photos as if there is any big change in lighting between shots the results might not be ideal.  But for photos took under the lighting conditions ect it should work fine for. 

 

You could also try Filter>Colours>Auto White Balance and see how the image is after that.  Again for images shot under the same conditions it should match between photos.

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I will give that a try. I was also thinking of copying and pasting one image to the other and then trying the white balance picker. I shoot my photos with my camera set on auto white balance, so the white balance will be adjusted based on what is in the frame when I take the photo.

 

Did some testing. None of the ideas work. I will do my best visually and then have my wife (not color blind) confirm the color. Thanks.

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3 hours ago, barninga said:

did you try the LUT export/import function? it basically allows to export the colour palette from one image and apply it to another image.

i'm not sure it will work, i did not try, this is just a guess.

I couldn't get that to do anything.

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Are you trying to make two photographs, taken in different locations and time, match each other.

 

For that, the only way is to do it visually (ask Mrs. K for help) or/and take measurements using the info panel There is no automatic or easy way. 

 

Here I set three targets, placed around the image to measure the colours.

info.png.be992f9cedfd665fef11c0e834757607.png

targets

targets.png.53eb4b18f16491c59521408714d83f1a.png

 

You just have to adjust the images to make them match.

 

 

Or, do you want to take two photographs, taken at the same time and adjust them in exactly the same way?

 

That is easy. As long as the originals have the same colour balance, adjust one photo and save a preset so you can apply it to other photos. They will all match.

 

Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions.

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20 hours ago, toltec said:

Are you trying to make two photographs, taken in different locations and time, match each other.

 

For that, the only way is to do it visually (ask Mrs. K for help) or/and take measurements using the info panel There is no automatic or easy way. 

Yes, and I will ask for her help. Thanks.

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hello,

i suggested to try with LUTs because -basically- a LUT should contain the tonal features of an image, thus exporting the LUT and importing it into another image should have the effect of transferring the tonal appearance of the first image to the second one.

so, i was surprised when @Mr. K answered that this process did nothing. that was not what i expected, so i made a try.

i made a duplicate of a pic, opened the original and applied a hsl adjustment, then i exported its LUT. I then opened the duplicate and loaded the saved LUT, expecting to get two identical images again. Instead, I obtained a completely different result: so, maybe there's a problem with LUTs in AP, or (more probably) I did not understand how hey work.

I attached the files to this post:

- trenino.jpg is the original pic

- trenino2.jpg is the duplicate - they are identical

- trenino-hsl.jpg is the original pic trenino.jpg exported after applying the hsl adjustment

- trenino-lut.cube is the LUT exported from trenino-hsl.jpg

- trenino2-lut.jpg is the duplicate image trenino2.jpg after importing trenino-lut.cube

any explanation or suggestion will be gratefully accepted.

trenino.jpg

trenino2.jpg

trenino-hsl.jpg

trenino-lut.cube

trenino2-lut.jpg

take care,

stefano

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Interesting. I probably don't understand LUTs, either :)

I took one of my photos, adjusted the white balance absurdly wrong, to make the appearance obvious. I then used File->Export LUT... to export a .look file.

I then reopened the original image, added a LUT Adjustment layer, and imported the .look file.

Visually the two files appear identical to me, or at least close enough that I cannot identify a difference. However, the histograms are significantly different.
(1) The histogram of all channels shows differences primarily in the shadows region, but a bit up to the lower midtones.
(2) The histogram for the red channel has major differences from shadows to highlights.
(3) For the green channel the histogram differences are primarily in the shadows, but extend up a bit toward midtones.
(4) For the blue channel the differences are similar to the green channel.

I'm not quite sure what any of that truly indicates, but it was an interesting experiment.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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24 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Interesting. I probably don't understand LUTs, either :)
...

Well then this one maybe more or less fun for you.  ;)

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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hello @walt.farrell

after reading your post i did the same experiment (i hope i did not miss anything).

i applied an exaggerated white balance to a pic, then exported its lut.

then i loaded an exact copy of the original pic and imported the saved lut.

i obtained a completely different result, where the second image histogram shows an apparent inverted symmetry with the one of the first image (please look at the attachments).

so i inverted (cmd-i) the LUT adjustment in the second image and what i got is an image that looks a bit "colder" than the first original image before the wb adjustment; the two histograms are similar and reflect -i think- the differences between the two pics.

this mystery gets deeper and deeper :)

can someone from the AP crew help please?

 

EDIT: after posting this, i've gone through some switching back and forth amon the active applications on my mac. then i came back to AP... and added a pixel layer above the lut adj layer, then painted a bit on it. then i disabled it and, to my surprise, i found that inverting the LUT adjustment makes the image appear as if no lut had been loaded - that is, the image looks identical to the original one.

so, i am certainly missing something about luts, but it looks like something does not work right as intended anyway.

 

detail-image1-after-wb.jpg

hist-image1-after-wb.jpg

detail-img2-after-loading-lut.jpg

hist-img2-copy-after-loading-lut.jpg

detail-img2-after-inverting-lut-sdj.jpg

hist-img2-after-inverting-lut-adj.jpg

take care,

stefano

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13 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Well then this one maybe more or less fun for you.  ;)

Thanks. That looks interesting.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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well @v_kyr, no mercy for non-english speaking people here?

:)

the clip -better, what i could understand of the clip- reinforced the idea that luts are a tool suitable to share color settings among videos or pics to make the look uniformly.

this is what AP tutorial essentially say (i.e.:

)

but the effect i get by doing what i understood to be done is unexpectd. so, i think i am missing something, but what?

take care,

stefano

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Yes, LUTs (Look Up Tables) are usually nothing more than a table of numbers that apply a color transform to an image.  - For example with certain such setup table data it's possible to emulate the subtle nuances and color shifts of old analog film on digital etc.

The above video you referenced shows here as an example how to take the altered color information representative settings of an image and how to apply these to some digital video footage.  Another video here shows you the common tonal adjustments basics for LUTs. - However, for applying over several images shared white balance adjustments, making and (re)applying an individual WB preset (via defining more exactly the white, black or greypoints of a reference image, by using some gray card or color checker etc.) should be more accurate than applying tonal color shiftings!

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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yes @v_kyr, your explanation is clear and sounds good to me because you effectively described more or less what i had understood of the whole matter. thank you.

what i can't understand now, is the apparently strange and incoherent results i obtain by doing very simple operations of lut exporting and importing. basically, if i have 2 identical images, alter the colors of the first, export its lut and import it into the second image, i'd expect to obtain an image the presents (approximatively, at least) the same color alterations i did in the first one. if you look at the pictures i attached to my posts above, you can get what i mean.

take care,

stefano

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Usually you should get somehow similar looking tonal results for those images, but who knows maybe there are some platform related bugs in APh here when dealing with writing/reading/applying LUTs (?). - Can't tell you for sure or make deeper tryouts here, since personally I don't have/use APh for such image and photo related tasks.

If you maybe also have some other image app which can deal with LUTs, you can give that a try too in order to see if there is then a big difference when using the same images as samples here!

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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54 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

However, for applying over several images shared white balance adjustments, making and (re)applying an individual WB preset (via defining more exactly the white, black or greypoints of a reference image, by using some gray card or color checker etc.) should be more accurate than applying tonal color shiftings!

Yes, creating and using a WB preset does give more consistent results, from a quick experiment. Thanks. (Still trying to understand LUTs, but that's a low priority item for me that I won't worry about right now.)

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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thank you for your replies.

yes i think there is something wrong in the way ap handles luts, and unfortunately i don't have any other application lut-aware.

since, in my turn, i use to copy adjustment layers and paste them to the images where i need more or less the same adjustments, luts are a low priority item for me too. i was just experimenting, since from @Mr. K's reply i caught that something could be wrong. it looks like it is, actually.

take care,

stefano

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