Color Balance Issue

[Lon Howard]

I was never able to get happy with the color balance here, probably due to the wide variation of colors in the water and the bright sunshine. Lots of hue/sat adjustments with masking and the like. Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks.

[Geoff F]

Maybe the blues are a bit strong, particularly the midtones?

I suppose the obvious question is what did the original image look like?

[Lon Howard]

Maybe the blues are a bit strong, particularly the midtones?

I suppose the obvious question is what did the original image look like?

Here it is, Geoff ... the raw capture saved as a jpeg with no changes.

[Polar01]

Lon here is my take on the image, I do not know what you use to process it, I use ACR and Photoshop. Colour Balance tool chose the white strip on hull of speedboat. Then HSL to adjust saturation and then adjusted luminance of some of the colours. Not sure what is true colour of the sand is and it could be anywhere from Black to White. Below is what I can up with.

Cheers: Allan

[DanK]

Allan beat me to it. I was examining the image in Photoshop when he posted. I was looking for a surface that was probably white and guessed that the top of the boat is white. If it is, the image is considerably too blue. I would have ended up somewhere near to where Allan ended up.

One way to avoid this sort of uncertainty is to carry a small neutral card, like the pocket-sized whiBal. Take one shot with the card in the same light, and that will give you a neutral white balance to start from.

[Manfred M]

Sometimes using the editing software's auto white balance functionality is all it takes. This is what Photoshop's Auto White Balance gives me:

[xpatUSA]

Here it is, Geoff ... the raw capture saved as a jpeg with no changes.

The stripe on the boat is tempting for a neutral area but it appears to be lit by a blue sky and also getting some reflection from the water. Certainly it's HSV hue is cyan slightly toward blue (209 deg) - a long stretch for a WB adjustment!

So instead, I looked at the highest cloud top in the middle, and WB color-picked on it: the scene WB changed very little - from 6490K & 1.002 tint to 6444K & 1.023 tint. That suggests to me that the posted image WB is close to correct, on the basis that the cloud's lighting is by mid-morning or mid-afternoon sun.

All of that deduced in RawTherapee.

Adding contrast and a bit of chromaticity in Lab seemed to help the image quite a bit, IMHO.

[Wavelength]

I like the blue of the first image-be it natural or otherwise

[Lon Howard]

Thanks to everyone for your input. Here's where I have ended up to this point. To address a few things: Allan I also use ACR and Photoshop (CC 2018). As for the stripe on the boat, it did originally have a blue tint to it and since it wouldn't show any detail anyway I actually painted white right over it with the hope that the lines would still appear straight.

The beach was actually the light sandy color you would expect but the moistened part of it right next to the water's edge was almost the same tonality as the water itself due to the bright sunshine, so much so that the histogram was extremely skinny and disappeared at the top before it completed it's shape.

I now realize that part of my "problem" with the color balance was that I was trying to achieve more tonal contrast than was actually possible ... I really wanted to see some semblance of a sandy beach at the bottom and finally ended up using a sepia photo filter on that part of the image in an effort to do that (not sure if I made it better or worse ). I do agree with Geoff that the blues were a bit strong so I brought them down with a color balance adjustment. Finally, the dark portion of the clouds at the top seemed to distract from the overall appearance so I took the lazy way out and cropped them out as opposed to trying to work on them. Thanks for the input, it was very helpful.