Note
Archived discussion. This page is a verbatim copy of a thread from
community.ansel.photos, the Ansel community forum, which ran from March 2023
until it was taken offline in June 2025 after the site was compromised — a counterfeit
site had been planted inside the forum software, so the whole thing had to come down.
The original address was https://community.ansel.photos/view-discussion/whitebalancing-an-astromodified-camera.
You can check this copy against the snapshot in the Internet Archive.
Answers may refer to older versions of Ansel, and image attachments did not survive the shutdown. Current discussion happens on GitHub Discussions .
Posted by Jakob on 2025-03-22.
Hello,
Im very new to Ansel as I literally found out about the software yesterday. I am however very intrigued and will likely migrate soon. Up until now I am using Darktable for my raw development and to my understanding I can do similar whitebalancing actions in both programs. Please correct me if I am wrong.
My problem is the following: I am mainly a landscape Photographer with a great focus on Nightscapes. I am however also a student at the university and dont have the money for two Cameras. So my one camera has to do for all my photography interests. Recently I decided to astromodify my Nikon which means I opened it up and removed a filter infront of the sensor. In essence my camera now captures a greater spectrum of light as illustrated in the following diagram.
[attachment lost: image was hosted on the retired forum]
After the conversion I can capture a lot more light especially in the deep reds (H-alpha emission line), which is beneficial in astrophotography but all of my photos (obviously) come out very red.
My question now is the following at what point do I correct this color cast? The Whitebalance Module expects the camera reference at D65, did I change that by removing the filter? I can produce similar results by changing the RGB values in Whitebalance or Colorcalibration.
Any ideas are welcome
Jakob
Replies
Jiyone — 2025-05-03
> did I change that by removing the filter?
I believe yes.
You should use a calibrated monitor to calibrate your white balance, and a colorchecker chart to calibrate color.
Translated from English by : Aurélien Pierre, ChatGPT, Claude, Claude (Anthropic). In case of conflict, inconsistency or error, the English version shall prevail.