Tips For Adjusting Color Balance In Photos Using Photoshop Tools – White balance is one of the most basic and yet most difficult aspects of photography. While the white balance you set in-camera will be great in most cases, in other cases, you’ll need to adjust it in post-processing. Today I will show you several ways to adjust the white balance in Photoshop.
White balance affects how warm or cool your images look. We’ve written a comprehensive guide to white balance here that you should check out if you want to learn more about the subject.
Tips For Adjusting Color Balance In Photos Using Photoshop Tools
In practice, changing the white balance can have more than one effect on a photo. It affects the color, smoothness and saturation of the image.
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One of the biggest problems with using the wrong white balance is the color of your image. See the photo below:
The image is almost monochrome orange and has a very warm color. I don’t mind the overall warm tone of this movie (it’s After Sunset ), but it’s too far for me.
I took the photo above with a white balance of 8000K on camera. If you haven’t read the tutorial I linked to a few moments ago, 8000K is a slightly warmer white balance that creates “neutral” tones on a cloudy day. Since it wasn’t a cloudy day, it was a golden sunset that made the photo warmer/orange.
On the other hand, check out the videos below. I set the white balance here to 8000K, as in the image above. Shooting in different lighting is different. This time I took the photo in the middle of a cloudless day:
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It’s definitely a less hot color this time, but it’s still in that direction. As a result, the sky (which should be very blue) is washed with some muddy colors. Also, the parrot should be green, but yellow in color. If you use the correct white balance, you get this instead:
The difference is clear. Even though I didn’t change any other settings like saturation, the sky looks much better.
You may have noticed it in the examples above, but the color images can be a bit flat. For example, consider these photos:
I didn’t change any settings here like contrast or exposure, just white balance. However, the image on the right has deeper shadows and looks much better.
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The image on the right also has better subject separation. For example, a bird’s beak looks best on a plain background.
Many of us love to shoot during the golden hour, but getting properly saturated images can be difficult. White balance is a useful tool here.
For example, compare the two images below. If you’re interested in a more saturated look, you can use a warmer white balance like 8500K. Or, if you want a more muted image, a cooler white balance like 6000K is better.
It’s not that one movie is better than the other; They are different artistic interpretations of your theme. So, by creatively using white balance, you can get images that are more in line with your photography vision.
How To Adjust White Balance In Photoshop (2 Simple Techniques)
There are several ways to adjust the white balance using Photoshop. I will take you from the simplest to the most advanced.
Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) is a plugin that allows you to import RAW images into Photoshop and make basic adjustments. You can also convert non-RAW images as JPEGs with this tool by clicking “Filter > Camera Raw Filter” in the top menu bar.
You can adjust the white balance by moving the temperature slider. You can also use the eyepiece to select a neutral gray area of the image, and Camera Raw will automatically adjust the white balance (and color) so that your click area is gray.
Note that it’s easy to adjust the white balance of RAW, TIFF, PSD, and other minimally compressed photos. If you adjust the JPEG too far, you may notice some color problems or compression artifacts.
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Curves is a popular tool in Photoshop. Although you think of the Curves tool primarily as an exposure/contrast adjustment, it can also be used for white balance and color correction.
First, the one-click solution works by using longer lines. See the image below:
Create a Curves adjustment layer just like you did for the auto color correction above. You will see a drop down list to choose between RGB (default), Red, Green and Blue. First, select the Red option.
When you create a Curves adjustment (highlighted in red above), you’ll see an RGB drop-down menu (highlighted in green above)
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When you select one of the specific colors — red, in this case — the tool changes that color and its fill. For example, when you increase red, blue decreases.
Since this image has a warm tone, you’ll want to tone down the reds in the highlights, midtones, and shadows. To do this, drag the red line slightly down from the upper right corner to improve the red color.
As you can see in the example above, warm colors are controlled. But the image looks green, so discard the green as you did the reds, as shown in the example below.
Now, the green channel looks better. But the image still seems to have a slightly warm tone. Adding a bit of blue to the image sets the final tone of the image as shown below.
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Now the image looks natural. The whites in the upper left corner are not molded. Now, if you select RGB, the properties of the adjustment layer will look like this.
In most cases, the automatic settings work very well, especially in recent versions of Photoshop. But with difficult images, especially when there are light sources of different colors, manual adjustment is useful.
Finally, since Curves is an adjustment layer, you can use it in conjunction with layer masks to selectively reduce your adjustment in certain parts of the image. This gives you a lot of flexibility.
Although cameras are very good at automatically selecting the correct white balance, they are not perfect or always to your liking. I hope you are now adjusting the white balance in Photoshop if necessary. If you want to add any tips or have any questions, please leave a comment. Happy filming and editing! When you think of white balance correction, Photoshop is not the first program that comes to mind. In most cases, the white balance is set at the beginning of the workflow. And since the tools work well in Lightroom and other RAW processing packages, Photoshop isn’t necessary.
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There are cases when you need to change the white balance in Photoshop – here this article will be useful.
And when you’re done, you can adjust the white balance in Photoshop like a pro.
Disclaimer: Since you are no longer working on a RAW file in Photoshop, you are not technically changing the white balance information of your images when you use these tools. Instead, you change the colors and tones of PSDs, JPEGs, etc. However, the end result is similar to white balance adjustment, and for the purposes of this article I will refer to it.
There are many reasons why you might want to change white balance in Photoshop instead of a standard RAW processor (like Lightroom).
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Maybe you’re halfway through your workflow and have changed your mind about some of the choices you made during the RAW stage.
One of the reasons you might want to change the white balance in Photoshop is because you need to make changes in your workflow. Instead of going back to your RAW processor and starting from scratch, you can make adjustments in Photoshop.
Maybe an adjustment of other colors in the image is not to your liking and you want to adjust the white balance.
Various tools that will make you do this task easily and without discarding any of your previous edits.
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All of the methods mentioned in this article are non-destructive – three through adjustment layers and one through the use of smart objects.
Finally, when it comes to changing the white balance in Photoshop, the Camera Raw filter can be great
Select why Filter opens an interface that allows you to use Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop.
If you use ACR or Lightroom, you will already be familiar with the filter interface and it should be a piece of cake to work with.
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If you are already familiar with Lightroom, it will be easy to find your way around the Camera Raw filter.
To get started with the Camera Raw filter, create a new layer, then copy all of your previous layers using Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E (Cmd+Alt+Shift+E on a Mac) and paste them into your newly created layer. . If you want this setting to be permanent, right-click New
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