What's With Tint?

[JollyGreybeard]

Hello all,

In my Nikon cameras I have a choice to work with white balance in one of three ways. Various auto options, set the white balance based on the current shooting conditions, i.e. cloudy, etc., or manually set the temperature in degrees kelvin. Nowhere to my knowledge does the camera record a Tint value (green/magenta spectrum), at least that is visible to the user. However, when a photo is imported into Lightroom Classic an "As Shot" Tint value is rendered.

While I shoot raw and can adjust the Tint value to my aesthetic choice, I would like the ability to understand how Tint is established in Lightroom Classic. Is my Nikon camera capturing a Tint value in some sort of automatic way? Is Tint not a value in camera, but something Adobe assigns to a photo?

There are times in the field, especially for landscape work, where I like to view the scene and then manually adjust white balance to accurately render color to what I see in the moment. Since Tint has a huge impact, this can mess the process up. Inevitably, when I'm back on my computer I can't really remember the color I saw in the field.

Your thoughts are appreciated.

Tom

 

[DRwyoming]

I would like the ability to understand how Tint is established in Lightroom Classic. Is my Nikon camera capturing a Tint value in some sort of automatic way?

Yes, Tint as well as Temperature are set in the camera. You can even go in and customize both the Tint and Temperature and save them as custom white balance settings but though it's simpler to just think about white balance in terms of color temperature the camera does apply both a temp and a tint value as metadata to a RAW file and sends that along to your RAW converter that can start with those values or ignore them depending on your converter settings. And of course if you shoot in-camera jpeg both the Temp and Tint are used during that in-camera conversion.

Here's some info on Z8 WB settings including how you can fine tune both Temperature (amber - blue) an Tint (green - magenta) in the camera:

White Balance

onlinemanual.nikonimglib.com

 

[JollyGreybeard]

Thank you DRwyoming. This is very useful!

 

[JAJohnson]

There are times when I'll take a photo, using spot metering, of something in a scene I think will translate closely to middle gray in tone. In camera I set white balance to either Auto1 or Natural Light Auto. This will capture the specific white balance settings determined by the camera's light meter. This can be helpful if I need to adjust white balance settings while editing in Lightroom or NX Studio. I used to keep a gray card in my bag for doing this, but I haven't used one in the past several years.

 

[dabhand16]

Hello all,

In my Nikon cameras I have a choice to work with white balance in one of three ways. Various auto options, set the white balance based on the current shooting conditions, i.e. cloudy, etc., or manually set the temperature in degrees kelvin. Nowhere to my knowledge does the camera record a Tint value (green/magenta spectrum), at least that is visible to the user. However, when a photo is imported into Lightroom Classic an "As Shot" Tint value is rendered.

While I shoot raw and can adjust the Tint value to my aesthetic choice, I would like the ability to understand how Tint is established in Lightroom Classic. Is my Nikon camera capturing a Tint value in some sort of automatic way? Is Tint not a value in camera, but something Adobe assigns to a photo?

There are times in the field, especially for landscape work, where I like to view the scene and then manually adjust white balance to accurately render color to what I see in the moment. Since Tint has a huge impact, this can mess the process up. Inevitably, when I'm back on my computer I can't really remember the color I saw in the field.

Your thoughts are appreciated.

Tom

As I'm a it colour blind I make custom camera profiles with a Colorchecker Passport. I have several for different conditions (although this might just be overkill) and I always carry it in case I am in an unusual situation.

I then set the WB in Lightroom from the image of the Colorchecker Passport that I took at the time. It has several options to vary the WB but I usually go for the 'standard' one as I can't trust my eyes.

Many people are a bit color blind and never know it.