In this article I bring together qualitatively the main concepts discussed in the series and argue that in many (most) cases a photographer’s job in order to obtain natural looking tones in their work during raw conversion is to get the illuminant and relative white balance right – and to step away from any slider found in menus with the word ‘color’ in them.
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If you are an outdoor photographer trying to get balanced greens under an overcast sky – or a portrait photographer after good skin tones – dialing in the appropriate scene, illuminant and white balance puts the camera/converter manufacturer’s color science to work and gets you most of the way there safely. Of course the judicious photographer always knew to do that – hopefully now with a better appreciation as for why.