Canon Auto White Balance

[redfishingboat]

Not sure if this would be considered a bug or a typo, but in the table of Canon tags: https://exiftool.org/TagNames/Canon.html. under "Canon WhiteBalance Values" a value of 0 returns "Auto" and a value of 23 returns "Auto (ambience priority)"

However, according to the Canon documentation below, the legacy default "Auto" White Balance is actually the "Ambience priority" style of AWB, whereas the newer AWB introduced in 2016 is actually the "white priority" flavor of White Balance.

https://en.canon-cna.com/pro/infobank/white-balance/

Relevant text, emphasis mine: "In 2016, Canon introduced two versions of Auto White Balance: Ambience Priority and White Priority. Ambience Priority is the default, and the AWB method used in earlier Canon cameras. It is useful when you want to retain a little of the warmth of artificial lighting. In White Priority mode, however, the camera will attempt to remove any warm cast from the image so that any whites are pure white."

I think that when a Canon R3 is set to the newer "white priority" flavor of AWB it is recording the WB as code 23 and Exiftool is reporting "Auto (ambience priority)" when code 23 should be "Auto (white priority)" 

-Mick

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Mick,

Sorry for the delay in responding.  To change this, we really need original samples from an EOS 5DS shot with both white priority and ambience priority (since this is how the value was first decoded), but after some searching I haven't been successful in locating these to confirm the ExifTool decoding, but I suspect that ExifTool's decoding of this would be correct for the 5DS.  This would then leave the question as to what should be done if the R3 is using the value of 23 for a different purpose?

- Phil