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White balance doesn't work correctly


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Unfortunately the white balance doesn't work for me.

This is the original image:

white-balance-original.jpg.919a591caecbe0e32f99242373689aa9.jpg

There is a significant color fault. I tried the white balance and used the pipette. This is the result:

white-balance-affinity.jpg.764632bcb433b57b6752d6b554402879.jpg

The photo is still somewhat reddish. I had to correct the remaining color fault by reducing red by use of color balance:

white-balance-affinity-minusred.thumb.jpg.179f0fc1203bdb0f1d71be988facbb12.jpg

In Photoshop Elements 14 the white balance works fine whithout further measure:

white-balance-PSE14.jpg.3bd6fd8140169fbc0c86740ad98d6b9c.jpg

Is this a bug of Affinity Photo or did I do something wrong?

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What happens if you use the pipette & click on the shiny highlight on the headboard?

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I'm unclear what "using the pipette" means in the context of a white balance adjustment. Any information to help me understand that will be appreciated :)

-- Walt
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7 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I'm unclear what "using the pipette" means in the context of a white balance adjustment. Any information to help me understand that will be appreciated :)

I believe the correct term is Picker.

picky.jpg.b77992a5981ac59398f82ad00e690e50.jpg

Click on that to get crosshairs to sample the image. 

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

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Thanks, @toltec, that's what I suspected, but saying "pipette" made me wonder if they meant that one of the two color picker tools from outside the dialog was being used, somehow :)

-- 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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Unfortunately I have a german version and therefore my translations of the terms are not always correct. In the meantime I figured out how to switch the language; in future posts I will switch to english so that I'm able to use the correct terms. Thanks @toltec for clarification.

@R C-R Picking the highlight doesn't improve the result:white-balance-highlight.jpg.87a0a5e2ca7eb954b6b5510c8409245c.jpg

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Actually I would consider Pipette to be a better analogy for the Colour Picker tool :27_sunglasses:

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@Sempervivum : I agree, apparently it needs some manual-adjustments or some kind of 2nd action to get a fine result. but the way I see it, the image you've retouched with photoshop is not neutral either but has a very slight green touch. 

@firstdefence : Pipette? Doesn't do it for me (it suggests that after I've sampled a color I can drop it on another object), whereas "Picker" does what it suggests to me. (my native language is german though).

 

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52 minutes ago, owenr said:

Yes there's definitely a bug. Whenever I've used the white balance adjustment picker in Photo persona or Develop persona, the Tint slider has never moved off 0%

Just drag the picker around and search for a point where colors might appear to be more "on target and corrected" .

 

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9 minutes ago, owenr said:

The tool is broken.

If you mean the picker in the White Balance adjustment, it is working here on the Mac version, exactly as described in https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/pages/Adjustments/adjustment_whiteBalance.html. It does not change the tint slider, but I don't think that is what is supposed to do.

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To find the lightest part of the image use a Threshold Adjustment filter and move the slider to the right until you have only a small amount of white and the rest of the image is black, what you end up with is a hotspot, in this image that hotspot occurs at 70% on the threshold slider, you can mark this with vertical and horizontal guides, then turn the threshold filter off, the guides will indicate where you need to place the picker for the white balance, but, this is only part of the solution...

12 hours ago, Sempervivum said:

did I do something wrong?

Yes you took a poor image or whoever took the image didn't get the white balance right, in fact they got it very wrong, consequently you actually have made it difficult to play with in order to get a good white balance compensation and using white balance alone will not solve this image. You can use the Threshold trick and then use Levels or curves to pull it up from there, Levels for a quick approximation and curves will give you more control and better adjustability.

Its difficult for us to give advice on an image when we have no point of reference.

538167969_white-balance-original-Tweakedtodeath.jpg.204e07efcc4d45e304735571d1a539e7.jpg

 

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1 hour ago, firstdefence said:

Its difficult for us to give advice on an image when we have no point of reference.

Particularly when the only image we have is what seems to be an odd sized jpeg with an unknown amount of lossy compression applied.

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Did a quick search for "Dandelion Bokeh Murals" and found these, (see images below) so, assuming these were taken by professionals and assuming they have got the white balance and colour references correct to the mural design and print, we can use these as a reference as to what the mural should look like, again I'm assuming the image is of the mural and not of the bedroom in general, we can get a close approximation of how the mural should look.

So, the challenge is on, get to work tweeters and lets see how close you can get, remember to share your settings or the tweaked file for all to learn from.

Dandelion Bokeh Mural1.jpg

Dandelion Bokeh Mural2.jpg

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  Tweaked to death SE01 EP2 Adjustment Hell & Redemption.afphoto :P Just added a light to brighten the left side up a bit and give a more even light.

1146975632_ScreenShot2018-05-27at08_34_45.png.69dd6c8597baa6b22669155bebb019fb.png

With a light added.
1819458856_ScreenShot2018-05-27at09_24_07.png.295a5e8fca8a3cc5e35dc4425be7a545.png

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32 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

... so, assuming these were taken by professionals and assuming they have got the white balance and colour references correct to the mural design and print, we can use these as a reference as to what the mural should look like ...

If nothing else, as references they suggest that the PSE 14 white balance adjustment is no better than the Affinity one, just different. 

1 hour ago, firstdefence said:

So, the challenge is on, get to work tweeters and lets see how close you can get, remember to share your settings or the tweaked file for all to learn from.

Using the original 958 × 710 px jpeg from the first post, Affinity Photo, & a minimal amount of effort, I get this:

368679362_AutolevelsWB.jpg.b6a4aeb672f2b76a71bf850ef42dbdb0.jpg

The only tweaking I did was to first apply Auto Levels & then Auto White Balance. Auto levels is responsible for almost all the changes; auto WB just gave the image a slightly cooler color cast. It is far from a perfect fix for this photo, but I think it is a much better one than futzing with a lot of manual adjustments would be, particularly considering the jpeg source file & the few seconds it took.

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14 minutes ago, R C-R said:

If nothing else, as references they suggest that the PSE 14 white balance adjustment is no better than the Affinity one, just different. 

Using the original 958 × 710 px jpeg from the first post, Affinity Photo, & a minimal amount of effort, I get this:

368679362_AutolevelsWB.jpg.b6a4aeb672f2b76a71bf850ef42dbdb0.jpg

The only tweaking I did was to first apply Auto Levels & then Auto White Balance. Auto levels is responsible for almost all the changes; auto WB just gave the image a slightly cooler color cast. It is far from a perfect fix for this photo, but I think it is a much better one than futzing with a lot of manual adjustments would be, particularly considering the jpeg source file & the few seconds it took.

and... the colours in the bokeh pop so you can see the differences, also the slight flare top right still retains its rainbow lol!

In digital photography, especially amateur digital photography, there is no shame in taking images with different settings to get a result you want, a few minutes messing around with settings on a mobile or camera can save a lot more time at the computer. 

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15 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

and... the colours in the bokeh pop so you can see the differences, also the slight flare top right still retains its rainbow lol!

After applying the two auto adjustments there is still a reddish color cast, most noticeable on the mattress covers, & the headboard looks a bit too green to me. I suspect some of this is because the jpeg is a bit noisy & has quite a few compression artifacts, so it would probably work better on a cleaner image with lossless or no compression.

I also played around with setting the WB manually on the whole image using the picker & then adding a second WB adjustment confined to the headboard, for both using the rectangular picker sampling option. That produced marginally better results. Considering the relatively low quality of the original, it just did not seem worth the effort.

55 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

In digital photography, especially amateur digital photography, there is no shame in taking images with different settings to get a result you want, a few minutes messing around with settings on a mobile or camera can save a lot more time at the computer. 

This is more or less equivalent to the "I can fix it in the mix" philosophy in audio work. Maybe you can but it takes a lot of time & it probably won't be as good as getting everything right to begin with would have been.

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13 hours ago, R C-R said:

If you mean the picker in the White Balance adjustment, it is working here on the Mac version, exactly as described in https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/pages/Adjustments/adjustment_whiteBalance.html. It does not change the tint slider, but I don't think that is what is supposed to do.

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.

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