[vonBaloney]

My understanding is that CTE (Color Temperature Enhancement) is just a tweak to AWB with a bias towards the dominant color rather than correcting such as a color cast, such that the golden hour still looks golden and the blue hour still looks blue and rain forests still look verdant. One can accomplish much the same by setting WB to "daylight" or 5200K. In all cases the capture data in the RAW remains the same and all that changes are the WB data in the makernotes.

That being said, your point is well taken in that it is not unusual to get home from a "golden hour" session only to find that it looks more like the plain white hour when reviewing the images later.

That's what I'm getting at. I'm not trying to "accomplish" anything with it -- it is leaving a reminder for me that it *was* golden hour, or the light was cool that day or whatever. When I am processing it later and trying to figure out what will make it look best, a helpful starting point is knowing what the light was really like. (I may be processing this picture years after it was taken in some cases.) And you can just leave it on that setting all the time just like you would AWB. And if you want AWB, you just hit "auto" in LR (or equivalent for whatever processing program you use) and it does just as well as AWB would have (on average, you will end up with slightly different results, sometimes better, sometimes worse). You can even bake the "auto" into your default import settings so you never even see the CTE version unless you want. I think it is a cool feature -- I find it helpful, anyway.

[stevebrot]

best way to get an accurate color rendition

It occurred to me over dinner that I should come back and address this desire specifically. "Accurate" white balance results in a gray card (if part of the subject) evaluating to equal amounts of red, green, and blue. Accurate as that might be, it is not always desirable nor does the "correction" of a color-deficient spectrum always result in a natural rendering. White balance is a blunt tool. That is why shooting RAW and mastering the color balance adjustments in the PP tool of one's choice are essential to getting the results you visualized in the field.


Steve

[psoo]

It occurred to me over dinner that I should come back and address this desire specifically. "Accurate" white balance results in a gray card (if part of the subject) evaluating to equal amounts of red, green, and blue. Accurate as that might be, it is not always desirable nor does the "correction" of a color-deficient spectrum always result in a natural rendering. White balance is a blunt tool. That is why shooting RAW and mastering the color balance adjustments in the PP tool of one's choice are essential to getting the results you visualized in the field.


Steve

Thanks Steve, well said. I often, use post-processing to enhance the image to my liking, even though the final image is not close to real life. However, I still don't like too much blue under any circumstance and try to remove it.

[photoptimist]

It occurred to me over dinner that I should come back and address this desire specifically. "Accurate" white balance results in a gray card (if part of the subject) evaluating to equal amounts of red, green, and blue. Accurate as that might be, it is not always desirable nor does the "correction" of a color-deficient spectrum always result in a natural rendering. White balance is a blunt tool. That is why shooting RAW and mastering the color balance adjustments in the PP tool of one's choice are essential to getting the results you visualized in the field.


Steve

Great points!

And it is worth noting there are at least definitions of "accurate:"

1) RGB reflectance: The accurate surface colors of the subject if it was being lit by perfectly white light (not the scene's lighting).

2) RGB photon flux: The accurate light levels of the colors of the lighting on the subject.

3) Human vision: The most accurate rendition of the colors of subject as seen by a human eyes at that location (with human eye AWB).


Definition #1 is essential to fashion and product photography. Definition #2 is essential for science (photometry, spectrophotometry, astrophotography). Definition #3 is probably best for event photography.

(And of artistic purposes, none of these definitions of accuracy may be useful.)