Yes, I am coming at this from a photography perspective and it's pretty evident that you know a lot more about it than I do. The Cambridge Color articles are excellent. I've dabbled with Rawtherapee and the forums you reference are the only thing available with it. I'm very grateful for the feedback herein even if the discussion strayed a bit from my original question. However, that question did result from a very real problem that I experienced with GIMP for which I may be guilty of attempting to identify a plausible explanation myself. The problem that triggered the post comes from trying to do something with GIMP that one might argue has little to do with photography. If the question is whether I'm more ignorant about photography or GIMP, the answer is I don't know enough about either for it to matter.
One of the things that I've learned to do with GIMP is to frame a photograph in a somewhat decorative way to which I can add text which explicitly describes that picture and becomes part of (i.e., difficult to separate from) the picture. In that, better than what people did in the old days when they wrote on the back of a picture. This idea was motivated by the idea of producing long lasting printed pictures. I'm afraid when it comes to assembling such things as family albums intended to be passed down to future generations I have more confidence in the durability of paper & pigment than I do of digital media which is useless by itself (i.e., other technology and, oh yes, knowledge needed to use).
A recent experience involved doing this where the color of the frame is picked for complimentary purposes from the photograph. In that, digital image from camera pasted onto background frame sized for photo paper using GIMP. When the jpg picture exported from GIMP is printed on my Canon Pixma Photo Printer the color of the frame changes from I'd describe as grayish brown when viewed on my monitor with some aging eyeballs using GIMP, or any other software, to what I'd describe as grayish green on the photo paper viewed with those same eyeballs. What is very curious is that the object in the picture from which the color was picked appears the same on both paper and monitor. Also, my workstation is positioned near a window that delivers lots of natural sunlight during the daytime. I just last night came to notice that the colors in question look much more like I've expected when viewed by an incandescent lamp. Is this a real life example/lesson in white balance?
The good news is that these frames are not intended to be focal points of attention but rather unobtrusive. The color deviation did not change this and the picture is still good even if the color of the frame is not faithful to what I was trying to create.
Finally, the summary of the referenced article at Cambridge Color says something that makes all kind of sense to me which is "My advice is to know which colors your image uses, ...". Might this mean I need to learn how to understand histograms?
Sorry about the verbosity but THANKS AGAIN.
One of the things that I've learned to do with GIMP is to frame a photograph in a somewhat decorative way to which I can add text which explicitly describes that picture and becomes part of (i.e., difficult to separate from) the picture. In that, better than what people did in the old days when they wrote on the back of a picture. This idea was motivated by the idea of producing long lasting printed pictures. I'm afraid when it comes to assembling such things as family albums intended to be passed down to future generations I have more confidence in the durability of paper & pigment than I do of digital media which is useless by itself (i.e., other technology and, oh yes, knowledge needed to use).
A recent experience involved doing this where the color of the frame is picked for complimentary purposes from the photograph. In that, digital image from camera pasted onto background frame sized for photo paper using GIMP. When the jpg picture exported from GIMP is printed on my Canon Pixma Photo Printer the color of the frame changes from I'd describe as grayish brown when viewed on my monitor with some aging eyeballs using GIMP, or any other software, to what I'd describe as grayish green on the photo paper viewed with those same eyeballs. What is very curious is that the object in the picture from which the color was picked appears the same on both paper and monitor. Also, my workstation is positioned near a window that delivers lots of natural sunlight during the daytime. I just last night came to notice that the colors in question look much more like I've expected when viewed by an incandescent lamp. Is this a real life example/lesson in white balance?
The good news is that these frames are not intended to be focal points of attention but rather unobtrusive. The color deviation did not change this and the picture is still good even if the color of the frame is not faithful to what I was trying to create.
Finally, the summary of the referenced article at Cambridge Color says something that makes all kind of sense to me which is "My advice is to know which colors your image uses, ...". Might this mean I need to learn how to understand histograms?
Sorry about the verbosity but THANKS AGAIN.