What, no textures?

[PaulMiller]

Imagine a grey card with a bright red dot on it. If you expose for the grey card and set White balance from it - what does the histogram look like?

Not all scenes are correctly white balanced by aligning the right hand edges of the channel histograms (many are though).

[tameigh]

I have a question then. What color was the background that is blue in the corrected image and grey in the original?

[Wirefox]

Not all scenes are correctly white balanced by aligning the right hand edges of the channel histograms (many are though).

I agree entirely Paul and that is why I added the caveat. To be honest I always balance by eye but I was trying to illustrate how the histograms can be interpreted.

Elise

It is not enough just to look at the red channel alone in this image and the imbalance is best indicated by the bunching of the blue and green channels to the left. We are not talking about clipping to the extent where you get the classic block reds. You would need to have a larger areas of red in the image. This would be detected by eye and would show as the histogram curve disappearing off the right axis as you have described.

Someone stop me if I am talking bovine excrement but it is my understanding.....Colin, Colin! .....these Kiwis are always tucked up in the land of nod when you need them

[Wirefox]

I have a question then. What color was the background that is blue in the corrected image and grey in the original?

Tim we are not saying that the 'corrected' image is what Elise saw. We are saying this is how the data captured by the sensor is interpreted by the software. If you read the histograms this is what the software tells you should be right. At the end of the day you have to be able to judge these things by eye. My eye says red cast ut I am not suggesting the 'corrected' image is right in an end all sense because it clearly is not

[tameigh]

Tim we are not saying that the 'corrected' image is what Elise saw. We are saying this is how the data captured by the sensor is interpreted by the software. If you read the histograms this is what the software tells you should be right. At the end of the day you have to be able to judge these things by eye. My eye says red cast ut I am not suggesting the 'corrected' image is right in an end all sense because it clearly is not

OK then, my understanding of WB is to correct the image so that it most closely matches what your brain automatically does under the circumstances. If the wall was a grey clapboard, then all of the WB shenanegins have done nothing but destroy the image.

I fully understand what you are saying here. I just disagree. That "corrected" image doesn't look like any rose I ever saw, unlike the original, and I am betting that the house that rose is growing against is not blue. T

[mythlady]

Most definitely not blue -- my house is a bluish-greyish-greenish (sounds awful, but it's not). It's much closer to the grey in the #3 post.

Not bovine excrement at all -- I'm trying to understand.

[tameigh]

I wonder if the original blur spread some red around. And then getting rid of the shadow spread it some more, giving the appearance of a cast in the capture? When I try to get the red out of the wall, even in the original, it goes right to blue.

[Katy Noelle]

I'm going to just chirp in with a little observation that what might be part of what's confusing is that, sometimes, some roses do have more of a "Mediterranean-greenish" cast to their leaves. In other words, I've seen roses (Tequila Sunrise, in fact) who's colors tend towards Elise's, post #3 colors - roses with leaves that are not the normal leathery green. Maybe, that's part of what's confusing, here. Wirefox's "fix" does look good to my eyes but I was surprised that the original thought was that the wb was THAT far off. Elise, what do you think?

[tameigh]

Katy,
If you look at the top center of the original, there is red spread around between the leaves. If you try to get rid of it, the wall turns blue. I think it might be from the blur.
- Tim

[mythlady]

But there is red spread around between the petals -- each petal has a little red on it. Also, the first picture was processed with Color EFEX and that put some blur on the background (the particular process I used), but in the #3 picture, the only blur is from the DOF. I basically didn't mess with #3 at all, except to brighten it a little bit.

And Katy's right, the leaves are not at all green-green -- they're really kind of brownish.

[Steve S]

Elise, i'm not shure what the deal is with your photo. There is a red cast to it. If you shoot it again, try manual WB and pay special attention to the individual histograms so as not to clip any of them. I would be interested in seeing that image.

[mythlady]

Okay, I'll give it a try --

[mythlady]

Later: is this better??



I set a custom white balance, I took a shot off of something grey in order to set it (not an official grey card), and took the picture and it still had the red blip over toward the right side. But I messed with it in levels and got rid of that blip, and then fiddled with the green and blue until it looked natural to me. I'm repeating #3 here, so you don't have to flip back and forth.