Differences in raw converters; and white balancing a toilet at 40 fsw

I take snapshots with a Canon s70. (I always shoot raw, too.) The water here in Seattle is murky and very, very green, especially in the summer. And I prefer available light photos, which is obviously challenging.

I set white balance by using the WB tool in my raw converter. The target is a white or grey scuba tank, or a white anemone. Well, the other day I was playing with an old forgotten freeware app called "RawShooter Essentials 2006." And to my surprise the WB tool seemed to produce better results than the tool in Photoshop CS2/ACR.

Here is a picture developed with Photoshop. The WB target was the white toilet. (At full size it was easy to find a clean spot.)

Here is the same picture developed with RawShooter Essentials 2006.

As you can see they are very different! And the second one, done with the old software, seems to be better.

The two programs are doing different calculations, because copying the color temp & tint settings between them does not result in the same image. I thought this was interesting, and I was wondering if there was a better way to handle WB in Adobe Camera Raw.

The raw file (7 MB) is available here. (Unprocessed/auto-WB it looks like green jell-o.)

http://wrongcrowd.com/temp/CRW_0203.CRW

Full size jpegs are here:

http://wrongcrowd.com/gallery/scubaredondo...ondo_toilet_alt

http://wrongcrowd.com/gallery/scubaredondo/redondo_toilet

Horse,

I have both and haven't noticed that big a difference in the white balance except that I get slightly better colors with Adobe when I convert them to jpegs. I'd have to ask if you "missed" with the sample in adobe.

Horse,

I have both and haven't noticed that big a difference in the white balance except that I get slightly better colors with Adobe when I convert them to jpegs. I'd have to ask if you "missed" with the sample in adobe.

Fair question... I repeated the test and it's not a mis-click in ACR.

What kind of shooting do you do? Maybe ACR is worse with fixing green water than blue. Though I can't imagine why that would be.