When editing white balance on a computer, should I tweak tint or temperature first?

Question

Changing the value of one affects the appearance of the other, hence it makes a difference whether you change the tint value first and then move on to the temperature, or the other way around.

Answer 1

They are independent, the temperature slider affects the color temperature, which is effectively blue-yellow, while the tint affects the green-magenta axis.

In Adobe Camera Raw, the temperature slider is before the tint slider, probably for a reason, so I think the best strategy is to adjust them top to bottom, and this is the advice given in many books on the subject.

Answer 2

Personally, I prefer to adjust temperature first, and then tint. It is just much easier for me to adjust warm-cold (yellow-blue) balance, then get the right magenta-green. So my tint adjustemnts tend to be smaller, and I often look for just particular “known” color like skin tone.

I believe there are some reasons to do temperature first:

• human eye is very sensitive to tonal difference in blue
• blue-yellow is the strongest color contrast (probably high sensitivity to yellow wavelength vs low sensitivity to blue wavelength helps here; reference needed)
• it helps to separate cold and warm regions of the image

From the computational point of view they are independent.

Answer 3

They affect each other, but it does not matter which one you move first, the result is always combined from those two settings. While the temperature is used in a creative way and may be almost artistic, the tint slider is mainly used to correct lighting imperfections in the image and is more of an "emergency image saver" than a creative tool (even though in some cases it might be used creatively too). In most cases, I let the CameraRaw set the tint automatically (by selecting a white point in the image, using the tool that has color picker icon with target beside it) - that makes sure I corrected unwanted color changes caused by colored walls, neon lights nearby etc. When this tint setting is done, I then play with the temperature as I wish to get desired atmosphere.

Answer 4

The settings doesn't actually affect each other directly, but if one is too much off in the wrong direction, it's hard to see what the other should be.

Personally I find it much harder to adjust the tint, so for tricky images I first set the temperature to a setting where it's easiest to see tint changes, adjust the tint, and then set the temperature.

For example, to adjust the tint right for skin tones (caucasian), I set the temperature way too warm so that the people look mostly like Simpsons. That way it's easier to balance the red and green.