The top level comment was making a more general claim than just color balance. There are a lot of weird artifacts in phone pictures introduced by image processing overfitting.
I didn't really agree with the top level comment either. This isn't an artifact of sensor size or A/D conversion or any of that. You can encounter the exact same issue with a $40,000 medium format camera if you don't understand photography.
What's worse, the article's author never mentions the settings used while taking pictures with his Canon DSLR. The entire article is poorly informed, detail starved, click-bait garbage for the photographically and technologically ignorant. The replies to it are disappointingly similar.
In a competent camera, you actually wouldn't. You would take a picture in RAW format, and change the White Balance afterwards. Whereas in a tiny phone, the RAW images are of exceedingly low quality.
That's not generally how it works. Although it's possible, I promise you professional photographers shooting in RAW are setting their white balance well ahead of importing the files into any photo editing software. You're not going to set up studio strobes, or go do some landscape photography in the evening and just completely ignore your image settings. That's a terribly inefficient workflow. If you want to get a preview of what your image actually looks like in camera, that's just part of the process.
This is probably especially true for people like photojournalist, who shoot thousands of photos in a session and don't want to spend hours processing them afterward.
What about shooting in mixed light, where you have different color light sources inside and outside of a room? Do you think photographers are just saying "meh, this looks fine purple, I'll fix it in post"... or are they trying to capture the scene as close to accurate as possible (perhaps biasing exposure to compensate for limits in highlight or shadow detail capture)
Edit:
Bonus points: some photographers actually shoot in jpeg purposely to better emulate the experience of shooting color slide film. Is it a flex? Most likely. Are they demanding from themselves that photography remain a skill? Yeah! It's a skill. People take pictures, not cameras... and contrary to that statement I'm a firm believer that better cameras take better pictures.
> Although it's possible, I promise you professional photographers shooting in RAW are setting their white balance well ahead of importing the files into any photo editing software. You're not going to set up studio strobes, or go do some landscape photography in the evening and just completely ignore your image settings. That's a terribly inefficient workflow. If you want to get a preview of what your image actually looks like in camera, that's just part of the process.
Of course, but when issues arise, you can always change it in post. Also, you can batch set Auto WB in pretty much any competent image editor. But yes, in the vast majority of cases one would set a given WB.
> Bonus points: some photographers actually shoot in jpeg purposely to better emulate the experience of shooting color slide film. Is it a flex? Most likely. Are they demanding from themselves that photography remain a skill? Yeah! It's a skill. People take pictures, not cameras... and contrary to that statement I'm a firm believer that better cameras take better pictures.
I totaly understand that too, whenever I can I try to use vintage glass because it brings something enjoyable to the experience. But the photographers that shoot in JPEG typically do it in places where a missed shot isn't that big of a deal.
FWIW, every photojouranlist I've known shoots RAW+JPEG all the time or whenever the light gets fucky for this exact reason. And as someone who shoots multiple hundreds to a thousand images relatively often in a single day, it doesn't really add much issues to my workflow - I'm not going to be doing much anything with all but a few dozen images, and I'm going to be editing all of them even if it takes me two hours or so to make sure I'm getting the most out of my pictures. So if someday I forget to set my white balance, it doesn't make that huge of an issue to my workflow, main problem is that I'm not going to get as good af an impression of what they'll end up looking like when I press the shutter.
That said, in this particular situation, you'd be changing the WB in post.
"That said, in this particular situation, you'd be changing the WB in post."
I definitely would not be doing that lol. I would prefer to set up the camera so that I can get an idea of what I'm actually capturing before I go out. In this case you can take a moment to adjust WB and exposure and then just go out and focus on your images without worrying about too much changing in terms of exposure. I would be super annoyed shooting this type of scene if every time I looked down at the LCD I just saw a normalized scene.
You're completely missing the point. Many phones don't have a white balance setting in their default photo apps. They do so much post-processing to correct for various sensor issues it doesn't occur to them to give the user appropriate controls to correct for cases when the correction algorithm fails.
I've never come across a photo app without a WB setting. These people should discard their phones along with their notions that they are holding a camera that will always perfectly capture the scene as their eyes see it.
You can use the same receptacle to discard your notion that this article had any value.
What's worse, the article's author never mentions the settings used while taking pictures with his Canon DSLR. The entire article is poorly informed, detail starved, click-bait garbage for the photographically and technologically ignorant. The replies to it are disappointingly similar.