White Balance Correction by Using Photoshop

White balance is IMPORTANT – but most of (newbie) photographers always use automatic white balance, a little bit ridiculous but that’s the fact. Honestly most of times I also use auto white balance although I know I can’t get the correct color/tone. Since I still use AWB but want to get the correct color then I need to correct the WB (in post processing) by using Photoshop.

Before I tell you how to correct white balance, I want to make sure that you know what is white balance and why it is so important. You can check this link – you don’t need to get through into mathematics equation @@. You can see this link and other link to understanding white balance practically. If you are interesting about custom white balance you also can check grey card – most of professional photographers use it to set custom white balance. Some people also use Wallace ExpoDisc instead of grey card.

Now we are ready to go into the tutorial:

1. Open your photo. I’ll use my photo – this photo is taken by Jeffrey (thanks for taking this photo @@). This photo is taken by auto white balance, you can see the color is somewhat strange – the tone/color was influenced by the lighting (inside this building).

2. Add level adjustment layer then click auto (then you see nothing change hehe….) – Honestly, for some photos this is the quickest method to correct white balance, but in this tutorial I try to give sample of photo that can’t be corrected easily just by clicking auto.

3. Then if “auto” can’t solve this problem, what’s the next step we should do? I think if auto can’t solve this problem, you can use eyedropper (see photo below). There are 3 eyedroppers – these eyedroppers can help you to sample in image the black point, grey point, or white point. Usually I just use 2 eyedroppers, the first and third  eyedropper(I highlighted in photo below). First eyedropper can be use to sample in image the black point – you can see some areas that I highlighted with red color. Third eyedropper can be use to sample in image the white point – you can see some sample areas that I highlighted with green color. The process to get the best sample areas are by trial and error – click some areas and you will know the best sample area.

4. Then you will get this result – some of areas are overexposure, to handle this problem you need to mask some overexposed area:

Before masking:

After masking:

5. This step is just additional step – I just add more local contrast and sharpen the photo to make it looked better. So here is the final result.

Finally I hope you can learn some basic ideas how to correct white balance with Photoshop, just by simple step can improve the quality of your photograph. Hope you like this tutorial – any comments, critiques or suggestions are welcome. Thanks….

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Tags: auto level, correction, level, Photo, Photoshop, technique, tutorial, white balance

• February 26, 2009
• Photoshop
• 33 Comments