Originally Posted by rutt Nobody is causing trouble at all. I welcome all the comments. What I'm after is a dead simple explanation of the easiest first steps toward color balance, something that will put beginners on the path toward being aware of this issue and being able to do something about it. So the thread isn't aimed at any of us. But if it causes confusion, it's good to know that and try to figure out what to do about it. I suppose I could show images with poor color balance and what happens when they are fixed before I even get into the nuts and bolts of how to fix them. I'm really after the people who can look at a picture of a poached egg shot under tungsten and balanced for sunlight and balanced for sunlight without noticing that something is wrong (or if they do, not knowing what.) It might be hard to remember, but we've all been there. Take a trip in the wayback machine if you have trouble remembering.

If the first goal here is to teach people how to recognize when color balance might not be right and to your point of beginners not really seeing this until they see side by side with a corrected image, I think it help a ton to first show a lot more images. You could start with a bunch of images that are not color corrected. It's probably best if they are off, but not horribly off to let the viewer first think to themselves that those look pretty good.

Then, show the same set of images, but side-by-side with fixed up versions to let the viewer see - wow those corrected images are indeed better - I thought the first ones were OK so maybe I need to learn about this.

Then, walk through your steps for color correcting each one. Ideally you'd have some simple examples first (where clicking on a neutral worked perfectly) and some not as simple examples (with no easy neutrals in the shot).

Is not part of the difficulty here, that many of our readers do not have a calibrated monitor, so that they may not be seeing the file as we see it?

And even if our screen is calibrated, we have learned not to trust our eyes so much, but read the important pixel data directly, for confirmation of color casts or truth?

Thanks. This is the sort of feedback I was looking for. I still think there is nothing as good as having someone's own image fixed. But I think more examples in the beginning would also be good.

Originally Posted by jfriend If the first goal here is to teach people how to recognize when color balance might not be right and to your point of beginners not really seeing this until they see side by side with a corrected image, I think it help a ton to first show a lot more images. You could start with a bunch of images that are not color corrected. It's probably best if they are off, but not horribly off to let the viewer first think to themselves that those look pretty good. Then, show the same set of images, but side-by-side with fixed up versions to let the viewer see - wow those corrected images are indeed better - I thought the first ones were OK so maybe I need to learn about this. Then, walk through your steps for color correcting each one. Ideally you'd have some simple examples first (where clicking on a neutral worked perfectly) and some not as simple examples (with no easy neutrals in the shot).

Originally Posted by pathfinder Is not part of the difficulty here, that many of our readers do not have a calibrated monitor, so that they may not be seeing the file as we see it?

I don't think so. Would a calibrated monitor have helped you when you replied to this thread in 2004? Somehow, I don't think so.

Originally Posted by pathfinder And even if our screen is calibrated, we have learned not to trust our eyes so much, but read the important pixel data directly, for confirmation of color casts or truth?

That's more like what I think. My theory is that monitors, somewhat less than reality, but much more than prints, trigger our visual systems' own auto white balance. So we can look at a picture on the screen and just not see the color balance problem because we have corrected for it. Shown a corrected version side by side with a flawed one, almost everyone will prefer it (though there will always be cranks, er, exceptions.) In the thread from 2004, Lynn only saw the problem when she made prints. All the rest of us thought the images looked great.

With practice, we can train ourselves to see common color balance problems on our monitors, but it's still good practice to measure and check for common color balance issues.

New WB tutorial by Martin Evening:

http://lightroom-news.com/wp-content...itebalance.mov