So, where's the "correct" white balance?

[John Ricard]

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4 hours ago, rnl said:

Greycard.  

 

Isn't the Greycard only affecting the color temperature?  It's not tweaking the HSL/Color sliders.  And, as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I've tried every color temperature possible in LR.  I've also taken photos in the academy where I literally snap one image and then roll the Kelvin temperature up a bit, and then snap another, etc.  Then I look at the 30 or so images at home, and none of them are correct for that location.  Not to mention, the mats at the academy are grey.  Not perfectly color calibrated grey...but just plain old grey.  And that grey color is close enough to correct for me to color balance the Nikon and Sony files just fine.  The problem at the academy, as evidenced by the great corrections done in this thread, isn't just a matter of finding the correct color temperature.  It's a matter of adjusting how the camera records Red and Orange -which need to adjusted in the HSL sliders.

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[dau]

Fluorescent lights usually don't really have a color temperature. The light they emit just gives that impression to the human eye. Hence, fiddling with the color temperature setting in the camera or in post will not properly compensate for that kind of light.

The camera or the post processing software should be able to compensate the light from a greycard. All it has to do is to change the color channels until the color of the greycard is grey. 

[John Ricard]

17 minutes ago, dau said:

The camera or the post processing software should be able to compensate the light from a greycard. 

Maybe...but it doesn't.  Using a grey card is NOT going to give the results that you will get from the more precise Red and Orange adjustments listed in this thread.  

[adan]

Out of curiousity, which lens/focal-length did you use? The EXIF says "R-Adapter-M." However it looks like a wide-angle of some type.

Are you aware of the color effects caused by using uncoded or unindentified classic Leica wideangles on Leica's digital Ms?

In your uploaded image, I'm seeing a purple tint to the right edge, and a relatively blue-green tint to the left edge - classic "Italian Flag Syndrome" from using a short-focus wide Leica rangefinder lens on a digital M, but without letting the camera know which lens was used. (Without getting too deep into technicalities - this is not a flaw in the lens, or in the sensor as such, but simply an interaction of Leica's relatively compact lenses with the "architecture" of digital sensor chips, which is not the same as gelatin film.)

And therefore, there will be no one WB that reproduces the mats as gray everywhere in the picture. And those differences will apply to all colors, not just grays and whites. The skin of the foot over to the right is more magenta, because the whole picture to the right is more magenta. Picture reproduced small to make the "color vignetting" easier to see in a glance.

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If you get one point in the picture correctly WB'd, other points in the frame will still have the "wrong" WB - too magenta or too green or too yellow or too blue. And that can certainly "look" unsatisfactory.

And that is the primary reason Leica added 6-bit coding (and the option of correctly identifying the exact lens design in the menus) and a second exposure detector to estimate the actual aperture used, with the arrival of their very first digital M in 2006. So that the camera CPU can pre-process the images as they are made, to eliminate the uneven color stains. Which appear in a "known pattern" for each individual lens model - and different for each individual lens model, and also change with aperture used. The camera will also correct for overall vignetting (dark edges/corners as well a tinted edges).

If you do not affirmatively and positively let the camera know "this shot is made with a 28 Summicron ASPH at f/2" or "this shot was made with a 28 Elmarit (v.III) at f/4" or "this shot was made with a 24 Elmarit ASPH at f/16" via the menu or lens coding, you will get screwy color shifts, above and beyond adjusting overall WB and individual hues (reds and oranges).

[tobey bilek]

Best thing to do is use Whi Bal card and set custom white balance. Auto anything rarely works perfectly on any camera. Save that as one of the four custom setting and you do not need to repeat.  JPEG files are processed raw and lots of data is discarded and can not be retrieved.  Fluorescent lights are discontinuous spectrum which mens some colors are missing.  CRI ( color rendering index) needs to be high for photography and these bulbs are more expensive and not normally used.  

 

I would try a raw file ,  get the closest blue yellow, then check the green magenta tint. .  Try Raw Therapy, a free program,  to see what the camera is capable of doing.  Then buy the Whi Bal to do the custom white balance.    

[evikne]

In the latest update LR introduces something called "Flat Field Correction". This is extensively explained in this article. 

I'm not sure if this helps with your asymmetrical color shift though, but maybe worth a try.

Edited May 30, 2019 by evikne

[jaapv]

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Yes, it will. There has been a flat field plug-in for LR for a long time, and C1 has had it for years as well.