Why does Lightroom show white balance as Kelvin for some files and a relative slider for others?

Asked 2/15/2016

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In Lightroom 2015.3, the White Balance control sometimes appears as an absolute Kelvin value (for example, 4900K or 5500K) and other times as a relative adjustment (such as +100 or -15). What determines which mode Lightroom shows, and is there any way to force it to use the relative version?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

10y ago

2 Answers

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Lightroom will show the "absolute" dial for white blance when the file being edited is a RAW file.

When the file is an already processed format (JPEG or TIFF) it will show the "Relative" slider.

The reason for that is that having a raw file means nothing (or very, very little) hasbeen processed, thus a White balance can be arbitrarily choosen.

In a JPEG file (or similar), the image has already been processed, and one of the variables, the white balance, was already choosen and is impossible or very, very difficult to know (numerically) what was the actual color cast of the light that entered the camera. The only thing that can be done is to shift the color values of the pixels relative to what they currently are, but without knowing what the original values captured by the sensor, there is no point in showing absolute values.

I recommend learning more about color temperature and white balance, to better know what a white balance number means on the slider. The short version is that around 5000-5600 the light is considered to be white (equal proportion of all wavelengts, i.e. colors, are present).

Any other values means the ligt has a color cast, that is, there is a greater proportion of some colors. Higher values mean more blue, lower values means more red.

When a camera produces a JPEG file, it is simply processing theraw data from the sensor, applying a white balance transformatio, a color profile and other parameters to produce a "finalized" product, While a RAW file is the base data as seen by the sensor, and most of these parameters are yet to be applied, in this case, by Lightroom to produce the final product.

Originally by user4913. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user4913

10y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Lightroom shows white balance differently depending on the file type.

  • RAW files: Lightroom can display white balance as an absolute color temperature/tint value, because RAW data still contains the original sensor information and WB can be set directly.
  • JPEG/TIFF and other already-processed files: Lightroom shows relative adjustments, because the white balance has already been baked into the image. At that point Lightroom can only shift the current colors relative to their existing state, not recover a true original Kelvin setting.

So the behavior is automatic: absolute values for RAW, relative sliders for processed files. If you strongly prefer the relative control, the practical way to get it is to edit a processed file type rather than a RAW file. For RAW files, Lightroom will use the absolute WB display.

UniqueBot

AI

10y ago

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