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Participant
September 20, 2026
Question

White balance and tint way off, WHY??

  • September 20, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 9 views

Ok so let's start off by saying I use LR mobile on my phone and also take photos with my phone which is a Samsung galaxy s23 ultra. I use the pro camera and set white balance at around 4900K. My lights are set up to be around 4800K give or take. Either way even if white balance from lights were off and I corrected it with my white balance grey card it shoukd balance out correct? 

So, I take photos of clothes to sell on ebay. I try and get the colors and white balance the closest to actual colors as possible so the buyer knows what they are buying. My process is set up lights, take photo of grey card in the middle of where clothes will be, then take photos of all clothes (being careful not to move lights), then I crop on my phone, and then i go to LR Mobile where my photos have been synced to.

From there I open up my grey card photo, grab the dropper and place on the gray card. The photo will adjust and I get a green check. I then go to copy settings and uncheck everything but the white balance. I then back out and paste those settings into my photos. What's weird is most of the time when I back out after copying settings it readjust colors. Now I make sure it is on custom and not as shot.

Now here is where my problem is and whats weird. The actual photo of my grey card might not look bad at all but once I put dropper on it really messes up the color. I know it probably does this to adjust to actual true grey but still. It adjusts the temperature and tint. So I take that screwed up looking grey card setting and paste into my photos that may already look fairly close and it jacks it up bad!! The actual photo sometimes looks better than using grey card. 

This is really stressing me out as I thought this would be alot easier by using lightroom as was hoping it would be a stress reliever than doing it manually. Is there something I am doing wrong as far as inputting photos? Are my settings not saving? 

What is the proper way of doing this if I am doing it wrong? Oh an I am shooting JPEG only but that shouldn't make that big of a deal right if i am only doing a basic white balance correction? 

Any help is greatly appreciated and hope I didnt make this confusing. 

    1 reply

    Participant
    September 20, 2026

    Ok so today I tried again and I keep getting same settings and when I apply them it appears worse off. But what I think might be happening is the exposure is off. I raised the exposure to make the whites appear white and the colors look great. MYbe I need to start over exposing images