Darktable Tutorial | White Balance VS Color Calibration: The disturbing truth

We tested the white balance module versus setting the white balance with "color calibration", another module that can be used for setting the white balance (and it does other things). Which one is better? Watch to find out!

[AA-nikm]

Thank you! You have helped me find peace when correcting skin tones in darktable ❤

[Eigil_Skovgaard]

As far as I can read from the manual these two modules now interact with each other, so it's not a question of which one is best:
"Color calibration ... Chromatic adaptation is controlled within the Chromatic Adaptation Transformation (CAT) tab of the color calibration module. When used in this way the white balance module is still required as it needs to perform a basic white balance operation (connected to the input color profile values). This technical white balancing (“camera reference” mode) is a flat setting that makes grays lit by a standard D65 illuminant look achromatic, and makes the demosaicing process more accurate, but does not perform any perceptual adaptation according to the scene. The actual chromatic adaptation is then performed by the color calibration module, on top of those corrections performed by the white balance and input color profile modules. The use of custom matrices in the input color profile module is therefore discouraged. Additionally, the RGB coefficients in the white balance module need to be accurate in order for this module to work in a predictable way."

[i_am_chandra]

As far i know, with the more advanced high quality 'CAT ' introduction in the color calibration module, the WB module is used in the early stage of pipeline prior to the 'demosaic' module. generally it is recommended to leave the wb module as such and work on cc module as per my understanding .

[michalkubecek]

My experience so far is that while White Balance module is easier to understand and requires less work under "normal circumstances" (natural light or common artificial light sources that can be described with color temperature), the power of Color Calibration module is that you can achieve much better results when the scene is lit with "unnatural" light, e.g. unusual artificial light sources, light sources with color tint, reflected light from color painted wall, mix of multiple different lights etc.

[DJAnamaly]

what do you recommend for getting colors? Similar to the Hasselblad “natural color science” and Arri Alexa “revealed color science” like from the Alexa 35 out of the Fuji XH2 Raw files.

. The software is a big learning curve. Would really like something linear neutral true to life color profile if you could recommend some direction?

[Foche_T._Schitt]

It seems Filmic comes after color calibration in the pipeline which just screws all the colors up again...

[duduk]

Good day . I want to ask and ask at the same time. When will they update the languages. Thank you very much Jaroslav Dudek

[deepskypics]

I like the title part “the disturbing truth” it made me click it. Hahahaha