Tutorial - Your True Colors

Tutorial - Your True Colors

Indoor lighting and the color cast it gives is a common complaint I tend to read about in Den of Angels. Often, the problem arises from the type of lighting that is used when taking pictures. This can sometimes be corrected first through your camera. Even when you have used the proper settings on your camera, there can be some instances where a color cast will still appear.

Color Cast: When one color dominates above all other colors.

This tutorial will show you how to correct for color cast using Photoshop™ CS and PaintShop™ Pro 8.

Magnavox from DoA volunteered one of her photos as an example (seen above). This is the original image, only resized for this tutorial. My guess is that her lighting was the common incandescent light bulbs that we tend to use in the house. These lights tend to give a warm, yellowish cast in a room.

So, let's begin the tutorial!

On Photoshop CS, go to Image > Color Balance. (Fig. 1)

This is the Color Balance feature (Fig. 2). The three primary colors are Red, Green and Blue. Their opposites are Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. When getting rid of a yellowish cast in photos, you basically would add more of the opposite color.

On Yellow=Blue, I slide the arrow all the way towards blue.

Doing that started to get rid of most of the yellow cast in the picture. Notice the shirt the doll on the left is wearing and how it is starting to turn more towards a white color.

The picture had some slight red to it. To compensate, just slide the Cyan=Red arrow towards Cyan.

Now the whites in this picture are starting to show up a little better. The yellowish cast is now gone from this picture!

Our next tutorial will be done on Paintshop Pro 8. This picture was submitted by Sher of Emberwilde.com. Sher tells me that her background is actually white. There is a pinkish color cast in this picture. It's actually a magenta color cast.

No go to Paintshop Pro and let's try Automatic Color Balance (Fig. 3).

Here, I checked the Remove color cast box (Fig.4). Not knowing exactly what type of lighting Sher used for her pictures, I made a guess that it was something like Fluorescent lighting. Fluorescent lighting produces a greenish cast and since green is the opposite of magenta, I slide the arrow under Illuminat Temperature to 4200k (Kelvin) which is the color temperature for Fluorescent lighting.

Already, you can see that magenta cast disappear and the background become a little more closer to white!

Just to add a little more contrast to the picture, I went back to Adjust and selected Automatic Contrast Enhancement (Fig. 5). I didn't want the contrast to be too strong so I set it to Neutral - Normal - Natural.

Here, we have our finished picture in a more natural tone!

For those using Photoshop CS, there is also an Auto Color feature (Fig. 6).

This is the end result when using the Auto Color feature on Photoshop CS. I normally don't use the automatic features as they don't always produce the best results. For a beginner, it's a good way to start from. After using it, you can then go to Color Balance and try to get the background as close to white as you can.

If you have an image editing program like Photoshop or Paintshop Pro, it is a great resource when you need to do corrections such as this to give your pictures a more polished and natural look!