darktable modern White Balance for Infrared Photography

[@MTimWeaver]

Looks like I need to start researching Darktable for my workflow....

[@IRreCams]

Cool video! But I had mixed results using the modern whitebalance method for IR and stopped using it. I was getting some kind of weird artifacts (loss of contrast/sharpness/highlights and tonal value cracks) in some images. The reason is that a very "wrong" whitebalance is carried through a big part of the pixel pipeline before it is corrected in "color calibration". You will read in the darktable manual that "This technical white balancing (“camera reference” mode) is a flat setting that makes grays lit by a standard D65 illuminant look achromatic, and makes the demosaicing process more accurate [...]". Not only demosaicing, but also a few other modules in between "whitebalance" and "color calibration" module need some kind of "rough" and "good enough" whitebalance in the image in order to work correct (that is the only reason why the original "whitebalance" module still exists). This is why I ALWAYS use the eyedropper in "whitebalance" module and set a good whitebalance in the first place. You can, on top of that, use "color calibration" and refine your whitebalance setting. This comes sometimes really handy, as you can use mask with "color calibration" module. So the IR way of doing it is a little bit a mix between legacy and modern way of whitebalance. Maybe I should make a video about that in the future, are there enough darktable IR cracks out there interested to dive deep? :o)

[@robshea]

Thanks for sharing your experiences!