Does time spent in a certain ambient light temperature effect one's opinion on WB?

Definitely a dumb question, but my pre-coffee brain just threw it at me as I'm seeing the bright white sun shine peek through the deep gray clouds and affect my mood ever so slightly.

Just wondering if say, you have fluorescent tubes throughout your home, would your 'correct' white balance tend to be cooler and so on?

Most high end printers view under 5500K bulbs when judging color on a printed piece and you should judge color on a print under such conditions. Fluorescent bulbs can range from 3200K to 5500K and those can all be in the same room and some can be mixed in the same fixture.

To better answer your question when viewing printed pieces your color perception can be effected by the color of the light source. And also your brian after a few minutes will compensate some for color shifts in light. When you first put on a pair of tinted glasses you see the tint but after a few minutes the color starts to look more natural.

So the answer does it effect the way you see color maybe for the first few minutes you are in a different light source but you will soon get used to it.

Well, sure, if you think about it logically, there's no doubt that the ambient light will affect how you "see" the colors of an image. It's simple to demonstrate if you take a print and go from an artificially-lit room into the day light. Or, you can take a photo in your computer and, if you have Raw processing software such as the Canon app Digital Photo Professional (DPP) if you have a Raw Photo or Lightroom or Photoshop (with Adobe Camera Raw) and you change the White Balance between Daylight and Tungsten and Flourescent you can see how the compensation for the different types of lighting works.

People who are "serious" about photo editing regarding color accuracy will take this into consideration regarding things such as their wall colors as well as their lighting. How much it matters to you depends, of course, on your light source and how "picky" you are. There are other factors that come into play as well. Monitor calibration, for example, is a "must" if you are going to be picky about color in your output!

tonylong wrote in post #13423217
Well, sure, if you think about it logically, there's no doubt that the ambient light will affect how you "see" the colors of an image. It's simple to demonstrate if you take a print and go from an artificially-lit room into the day light.

True, but that's not the point. We view a print by reflected light and obviously the color of the light that's reflected will determine the perceived colors of the print.

But when we're looking at a monitor we're viewing direct light generated by the monitor. As long as the ambient light is significantly dimmer than the monitor's light I haven't seen any effect myself. But then I haven't looked for a difference.

OTOH, if we're adjusting color balance on that monitor it seems to me that bright ambient light might alter our judgment of perceived pure white. Which, I gather, is the original question.

This would be an interesting subject to investigate - I suspect variations, if any, would be subtle. How would we go about setting up an experiment? Tough, when we have to work with human perceptions - not anything simple like using an eyedropper and looking for 255, 255, 255.

-js

What I find interesting is how my perception of WB changes after a long editing session. Sometimes when I come back the next day I wonder what on earth I was thinking.

jra wrote in post #13424424
What I find interesting is how my perception of WB changes after a long editing session. Sometimes when I come back the next day I wonder what on earth I was thinking.

I have does this as well. After editing photos at the Stadium after a game I go home and get some sleep. The next morning I go back and find photos I skipped and view the ones I already edited.

or it could just be me lol

Well, when dealing with tricky light, it's always helpful to have a White Balance "target", either setting a custom WB (especially important if shooting jpegs) or, if shooting Raw, at least having a shot in the scene lighting with the target and using it to set the WB in your Raw processing SW.

That can definitely come in handy in regards to this discussion -- you can take out much of the guesswork.

Whie Balance presets are OK for a "starting point", but are not "exact" when it comes to various light sources. For example, I have a bare tungsten bulb in a corner of my study. If I use the Tungsten preset, well, it's an improvement over AWB, but when I use a WB target and then use the eyedropper tool in Lightroom or DPP it does make a significant difference, and you can see that the RGB colors on the target are accurately neutral, whereas using the preset doesn't show that.

Turn off your lights, calibrate your monitor