.:+*earlyspark*+:. blog » How to Set White Balance with Photoshop

How to Set White Balance with Photoshop
Thursday, May 24, 2007 11:06 pm

Preface: This post is about How to Set White Balance with Photoshop, not How to Set the White Balance with Your Camera. Also, leave a comment if you want me to make more photoshop/digital photography tips. Or to keep posting about jellyfish.

Your friend does not have sunburn, your grandma isn’t anemic, but your photos of them make them look like they do! It’s like that time I was a kid and I’d play with the “Tint” knob on my parents’ TV and made everyone look flushed or sick. So you want to correct the white balance of your photos, especially if you’re taking pics under that gawd-awful flourescent lighting!

The white balance is crucial in getting your photos to look as natural as possible — as if you were looking into a window to the other side. Now, there may be times when you don’t want this, like when you want sepia-toned photos or black & white photos but in general, you want natural-looking pics.

Most outdoor shots are pretty natural-looking but if you’re taking a photo where there’s a lot of green like a golf range or an outdoor garden, your average point-and-shoot camera will automatically overcompensate for that and make your pictures too green or maybe even too red. Most often, you’ll have a setting on your digital camera for setting the white balance automatically and I use this when I’m taking quick non-pro shots.

But if you want to do it more precisely, you’ll need a graycard — it can be picked up at any photo store and if you ask the people there, they’ll know what you’re talking about unless they’re complete idiots, then you walk out wondering why they work there. They’re the cheapest photography tool you’ll ever have to buy (like $10), and perhaps one of the most valuable ones you can add to your arsenal.

Ok, so here’s the down & dirty way to do it, not a lengthy explanation to prove my prowess in photoshop.

Take the picture you want with the graycard in the scene.
Then you take the shots that you want without the graycard.
Open up the pic with the graycard in it:
Get the color sampler tool (it’s under the eyedropper):
Click on the graycard in your photo
Look at the info window (Window > Info) — the RGB values of that point you clicked on shows:

If the card was perfectly gray, all the values would be the same but they’re not — looks like this pic is a little red. Let’s pick a value that is between the mean and median — 130, for this example.
Create a new adjustment layer for Levels
Let’s go down the dropdown list — choose Red:

You should see in the Info Window that there are an extra set of values and the value for Red changes as you slide the middle triangle back & forth:

For this example, slide the triangle until you get as close to 130 as possible. Do this for Green and Blue.
To remove the color sampler from the picture, just drag it off your photo. Now you should have a photo that’s more color balanced:

I picked a crappy example so you can only tell there’s a slight difference. If you see the difference, you get my approval.
You can now apply this Level to other pictures, just open that other photo and go to:
Layer > Duplicate Layer > and choose the other photo from the dropdown.
This should apply the Level you just created to the other photo:

I work at a library.