u/inoneart

It’s me again. I wrote earlier about the strange auto white balance settings on Vivo, but I want to show a case where the situation is even more noticeable and dramatic.

In this scene, the orange-yellow sun is breaking through beige curtains.

How on earth did it all turn red? Why did the side of the sofa suddenly turn green?

I’m becoming increasingly confused about where it’s getting these colors from.

I have to post-process literally every single photo just to make it look realistic. This is not cool.

And before you ask: Yes, I am shooting in the "Zeiss Natural" profile. Yes, I’ve tried tweaking the processing settings like noise, contrast, saturation, and brightness. And yes, I’ve tried enabling the Raw Lighting feature, but photos with it are actually worse than with HDR on: there’s less detail, the aggressive noise reduction doesn’t go away, and fine details just melt into large color splotches.

The only solution I’ve come up with is to stop relying on the Vivo x200 Pro as a "smartphone camera" and instead shoot in Pro mode RAW DNG's 90% of the time, then develop the files in Lightroom afterward as if it were a full-fledged dedicated camera. That’s pretty much where I'm at.

Time for some more analysis of the color processing on my Vivo x200 Pro. It handles white balance - and pure whites and grays specifically - in a very strange way.

In scenarios that actually call for a cool, greenish tint, it somehow shifts toward warmer, reddish tones. And vice versa: when you try to capture diffused warm lighting, it veers into cold shades. I don’t get it 🗿.

So, I either have to get used to the fact that the WB will never be predictable and just live with it - since it misses the mark systematically, not just in a couple of specific scenarios - or fix the colors in post.

Here’s a comparison between the Auto mode results and the corrected WB versions in Lightroom, which are much closer to what the eye actually sees.

This might seem like nitpicking, and many would find the difference negligible, but the overall user experience is built from a collection of small details like these.