Improved white balance picker

Seppo Helle

• February 16, 2021 14:47

Tried to find if this thing has been discussed, but it doesn't seem to be.There's athread about white balance problems in a church, but that is more about lighting than the adjustment tools themselves..

I use the white balance picker (eyedropper) a lot, but it is often inconsistent, and it could be smarter.

What bothers me is this (in the user guide of it this is step 3):
"Repeat the selection until you are satisfied with the result."
The problem is that even in a neutral area every pixel is more or less different colour, due to sensor noise. Now the tool registers the value of a single pixel, and I get a different result for every click and I can't be sure which one is the most neutral setting. It is frustrating.

I think the tool should work like this:
- You can drag from one point to another, and the tool selects a circular area (like when I'm drawing a mask). Then the average colour value of the area is calclulated and that is used for determining the white balance. Now you would have like hundreds of pixels counted in and colour noise would not be a problem. Consistent results every time.
- If you simply click on a pixel it would work like before.

I posted this same comment in the user guide, and I have proposed this by mail maybe two years ago, but haven't seen it implemented so far. I think this is a significant issue, because white balance is one of the first things to do for almost every editing task, and improving this interface would make things quicker and nicer.

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  Keith R

  • February 16, 2021 15:08

  

  https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/360000154057-Feature-Requests

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  Seppo Helle

  • February 16, 2021 15:42

  Umm... Keith, do you mean I should repost this to the feature requests forum, or are you going to move it there?
  I guess I picked a wrong section by mistake, sorry!

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  SFA

  • February 16, 2021 19:55

  Seppo,

  This forum is, mostly, Users sharing information and discussions with other users.

  The Capture One team has set up some folders - one of which Keith has suggested - to capture ideas and as an attempt to see how much interest they generate or alternative approaches might be suggested.

  With the exception of requests for lens profiles, where having numbers suggested in one place can allow for a popularity count, I don't think many other requests are regularly copied to the dedicated forum so it would seem like a good idea to do so.

  However, discussions about White Balance and accuracy can be quite interesting and may generate very different ideas from the individuals involved. 

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  Seppo Helle

  • February 16, 2021 21:21

  Thanks,
  I'm not too familiar with the forum, did a search first and then started a new topic but didn't check in which section it was going. I'll repost in the feature requests forum.

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  ---

  • February 21, 2021 12:43

  I’m very convinced the developers are totally aware of the WB issue but ignore it, they made an attempt to reduce the problem a little with version 20 but this did not change much the sample area is still far to small to get reliable results when using a grey card !   it is astonishing that a company which brags so much about image quality seem unable or uninterested to give photographers tools to make such basic adjustments with the needed accuracy and reliability.  but there is another thing more subtile, images containing neutral or close to neutral objects look never as clean as when processed with other converter, this is maybe caused how they calculate WB or the whole processing/color pipeline.

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