Adobe Camera Raw and white ( for color balance)

llre said:

I've come across several instances where someone has stated that white is the best choice to color balance in ACR. Something about how the files are encoded. Grey will work, but its not as accurate as white. Is this true? They point out that ACR only has a white sample tool, while PS has three grey, white, and black.

Click to expand...

I may be misunderstanding you, but the eyedropper tool in ACR won't work with white or anything too close to it. You need to sample something that you want to be a neutral gray.

Are the PS tools you refer to the ones in the Levels command window? I don't think they work quite the same way as a white balance eye dropper, though they can amount to more or less the same thing on certain images.

Maybe the problem is the grey isn't always *really* grey (meaning it could have a color cast that is imperceptible)? I have the X-Rite Colorchecker Passport and it has a white color balance target as well as an 18% grey target. The key is getting the right exposure. Once you have a well exposed image of the Colorchecker it works great, no problems with white balance. I just open the raw file in either Lightroom or Photoshop and click on the target and white balance is done.

It also has some smaller targets where you can adjust the white balance to warm up skin tones, for example, which can be very handy.

White is a terrible option to pick your WB from as it can’t tell if one channel is clipped or by how much. Any neutral tone will do but not white unless all three channels are underexposed.