2) It's a pretty sensible step if you think about interpreting the bayer image from a signal processing point of view, each red or blue channel has 1 pixel set for every 4 pixels, so if you're going to use any kind of low pass filtering then in order to have the correct energy you need to multiply everything by 4 (or 2 for green) to create a valid intermediary representation so that the average pixel values for the whole image would be the same before and after such low pass filter-based demosaicing, like blurring, halving or interpolating, because each set pixel will have to be averaged with 3 black pixels. I wouldn't call that white balance at all, the image still comes off as mostly green and applying the white balance coefs makes it look right albeit desaturated if I don't do the colour space conversion.
1 & 3) So you are saying that white balance should be done before the matrix multiplication? This perplexes me because usually white balance correction in an editor is done by the user towards the end of the processing chain, as in your editor gives you a debayered colour space-converted defringed rectilinearised image and then it applies white balance but if you don't like it you can do your own additional white balance which is a simple rgb multiplication, or so it seems to be since it seems WB adjustment is a lightweight operation. But to be consistent any WB change by the user in an editor would have to be done before even debayering and everything else would have to be done all over again for each user adjustment of WB. It sounds like that's what should correctly be done, right?
The reason I made this thread is that I first tried doing WB correction followed by the matrix multiplication, but in some cases it gives me rather dark purple highlights, so I thought there must be something wrong.
Here's my processing with WB followed by matrix multiplication: https://i.imgur.com/F3FjABw.png
Here's the libraw_dcraw_process() output with use_camera_wb set to 1 and highlight set to 0 (clip, so that means no reconstruction, right?): https://i.imgur.com/Y2uxhWl.png
If all 3 channels are maxed out but WB correction boosts red and blue and the matrix multiplication essentially increases the saturation then I guess it makes sense that it would turn out that way, but clearly I'm missing something rather important to avoid getting purple street lamps.
2) It's a pretty sensible step if you think about interpreting the bayer image from a signal processing point of view, each red or blue channel has 1 pixel set for every 4 pixels, so if you're going to use any kind of low pass filtering then in order to have the correct energy you need to multiply everything by 4 (or 2 for green) to create a valid intermediary representation so that the average pixel values for the whole image would be the same before and after such low pass filter-based demosaicing, like blurring, halving or interpolating, because each set pixel will have to be averaged with 3 black pixels. I wouldn't call that white balance at all, the image still comes off as mostly green and applying the white balance coefs makes it look right albeit desaturated if I don't do the colour space conversion.
1 & 3) So you are saying that white balance should be done before the matrix multiplication? This perplexes me because usually white balance correction in an editor is done by the user towards the end of the processing chain, as in your editor gives you a debayered colour space-converted defringed rectilinearised image and then it applies white balance but if you don't like it you can do your own additional white balance which is a simple rgb multiplication, or so it seems to be since it seems WB adjustment is a lightweight operation. But to be consistent any WB change by the user in an editor would have to be done before even debayering and everything else would have to be done all over again for each user adjustment of WB. It sounds like that's what should correctly be done, right?
The reason I made this thread is that I first tried doing WB correction followed by the matrix multiplication, but in some cases it gives me rather dark purple highlights, so I thought there must be something wrong.
Here's my processing with WB followed by matrix multiplication: https://i.imgur.com/F3FjABw.png
Here's the libraw_dcraw_process() output with use_camera_wb set to 1 and highlight set to 0 (clip, so that means no reconstruction, right?): https://i.imgur.com/Y2uxhWl.png
If all 3 channels are maxed out but WB correction boosts red and blue and the matrix multiplication essentially increases the saturation then I guess it makes sense that it would turn out that way, but clearly I'm missing something rather important to avoid getting purple street lamps.