Friday, December 14, 2018

There Is One Thing Pertaining To The Fujifilm X-T3 Adobe Has Not Yet Fully Fixed In Their New Release Of Lightroom CC (12/2018)

Daylight White Balance (5500; + 10) in Lightroom Classic CC;  Very, very green! (click to enlarge)
To correct this image for a white balance, I needed to add about 30 points magenta.  The other white balance
presets are off just as much.  Its hard to believe that Adobe didn't catch this glaring error.
When Adobe released this current version of Lightroom Classic CC in October 2018, immediately I found a bug concerning accurate color correction as applied to the Fujifilm X-T3.  I wrote and commented to Adobe support, along with many others, in hopes that Adobe would craft a quick fix.  This new December 2018 release of Lightroom Classic CC still does not fully correct the issue.  It appears the issue is partially corrected, but not fully, from my initial tests.  For those who own a Fujifilm X-T3 you may already know about this problem.  Let me explain.

This is what the white balance of the image above is supposed
to look like when invoking the Daylight Preset.


When in the Develop Module, Basic Panel, the default color correction is "As Shot."  Luckily Fujifilm's Auto White Balance is very good or otherwise this would be a much more significant issue than it is.  If you were to change "As Shot" over to "Daylight" or any of the other preset choices, the color correction becomes a sickly green as shown at the top of this post.  When looking at the White Balance sliders in the Basic Panel, the magenta slider was all the way over to about +68 for proper white balance, instead of about +10.   As I said, everything is green.


Auto White Balance Selected on the Fujifilm X-T3;  According to Lightroom the white balance
is 5150k; +28 Magenta  (normal is +10 magenta)

Corrected white balance by using the eyedropper tool in Lightroom and sampling the neutral gray square on the
top row, third from left.  This "correct" white balance turns out to be 5500; +28 Magenta, which indicates the
Fujifilm white balance is slightly cooler or blue from neutral.
Between the October release and this week's release, I do see some improvement so it seems Adobe has done some work.  However, I don't see the issue as fully resolved.

With this issue, you have two ways to improve the white balance for any particular image.  First, you can use the eyedropper tool if you have some neutral tone to sample.  Second, you can color balance by eye.  But you still can't rely on Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, etc., presets as they give your images a green tint.  In my tests, with this new version, about still 18-20 points green.  That is better than the first release, which was about 58 points green.

It is baffling to me that a company as experienced, sophisticated and dedicated to serving creatives in the visual arts can let a mistake as glaring as this get through their beta testing.  I guess it kind of goes along with the other complaints we have with Adobe.  

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Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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