Colour balance tutorial II

You may have previously visited my site because you were interested in learning how to make a colour balance adjustment to your image and read my original tutorial titled ‘Colour Balance Adjustment Tutorial’ or you are new to my site because you would like to find out how to make a colour balance adjustment to your picture.

My original tutorial is one way of achieving this (click the above link or go to my techniques category) but I have found another way to make a colour balance adjustment. The really neat thing about doing it this way is that you can easily compare on screen your original to the changes you making by splitting your image with the marquee tool.

The main reason for needing to make a colour balance adjustment to your image is because of a distinct colour cast. Having done some research I have found that this can be very true for film. Daylight film is meant to be photographed under light at 5500°K and that is why any variance from this temperature will create a colour cast (usually unwanted). You may not always be able to see this at the time you take your picture.

There are two main causes of colour cast, sunlight (or cool light) and incandescent light (or warm light). I have also found out that you can use filters to correct this at the time of taking the picture, for cool light you can use amber colour filters (e.g. 81b) to correct it, and for warm light you should use blue filters.

Another way to correct this is to use your image editor tool and make a colour balance adjustment, and this is a step by step guide on how to make a colour balance adjustment to your image. I use Photoshop CS5.

(Clicking on any image will allow you to rotate through them all).

1. Open your image in Photoshop CS5.

2. Create a new layer from your background, by selecting the new layer from background in the tool bar under layer. Click ok on the pop up screen.

3. Create a new layer via copy which is also found under layer on the tool bar.

4. Select the rectangular marquee tool and drag over your image. In this example I dragged it about half way over but it is up to you as to how far you need to go.

5. Under the selections category, select inverse and then press the delete key. (Screen shot for step 6 below shows you where to find the inverse selection).

6. On the right side of your screen, click the layer 0 (was your background layer) making sure this is the only layer highlighted, select inverse and again hit the delete key.

7. Click the deselect option.

8. Now create a new colour balance adjustment layer, which will appear in the middle of your layer selection found on the right hand side of your screen.

9. In the adjustments window (found on the right hand side) use the sliders to alter the colour balance on highlights, shadows & midtones. In this example I will make an extreme adjustment to the midtones so that you can clearly see the difference in the two halves of the image.

Here I have too much blue so I used the yellow/blue slider and moved it towards the yellow.

To make it easier to see what I have done, I have dragged the adjustment tool bar to the middle of the image.

If you look at the adjustment toolbar, you will notice that I moved the slider towards the yellow, to remove the blue cast. The actual change is shown on the image as well, on the left the original colours & on the right the new adjusted colours. The right shows a clear shift to a more green looking picture.

So what adjustment do you need to make for different colour cast. These are as follows:

Too much yellow move towards blue.

Too much blue move towards yellow.

Too much cyan move towards red.

Too much red move to cyan.

Too much magenta move to green.

Too much green move to magenta.

You can move each slider to obtain the best result possible.

This is the shot with my final colour balance adjustments.

10. Your nearly done now. Drag the colour balance adjustment layer in the layers window so that it is at the top, like so

11. Finally flatten your image.

That’s it.

Hope you found it useful.

Feel free to drop me a comment if you have any questions or any suggestions on how to make this tutorial better.