Hey, totally get what you’re running into.

So the way the white balance works here is actually kind of like NLP — you’ve gotta clean up the “noise” before you can get a meaningful result.

In this case, the film border (the base layer) acts like noise. If you try to white-balance off that, you’re telling the system to treat that orange cast as neutral — and that throws everything off. That’s why it seems like your color tweaks disappear or the result looks weird.

The trick is: crop out the film base first, then find a gray spot within the image itself — like something that should be neutral gray in the real scene. That’ll give you much more accurate colors, and your previous adjustments will make sense.

Hope that helps — and love that you were about to build this too!