Editing Color balance (section)

==Chromatic colors==

Color balancing an image affects not only the neutrals, but other colors as well. An image that is not color balanced is said to have a [[color cast]], as everything in the image appears to have been shifted towards one color.<ref name="Yule1967">John A C Yule, ''Principles of Color Reproduction.'' New York: Wiley, 1967.</ref>{{Page needed|date=September 2010}} Color balancing may be thought in terms of removing this color cast.

Color balance is also related to [[color constancy]]. Algorithms and techniques used to attain color constancy are frequently used for color balancing, as well. Color constancy is, in turn, related to [[chromatic adaptation]]. Conceptually, color balancing consists of two steps: first, determining the [[standard illuminant|illuminant]] under which an image was captured; and second, scaling the components (e.g., R, G, and B) of the image or otherwise transforming the components so they conform to the viewing illuminant.

Viggiano found that white balancing in the camera's native [[RGB color model]] tended to produce less color inconstancy (i.e., less distortion of the colors) than in monitor RGB for over 4000 hypothetical sets of camera sensitivities.<ref name="Viggiano2004"/> This difference typically amounted to a factor of more than two in favor of camera RGB. This means that it is advantageous to get color balance right at the time an image is captured, rather than edit later on a monitor. If one must color balance later, balancing the [[Raw image format|raw image data]] will tend to produce less distortion of chromatic colors than balancing in monitor RGB.