Learn How to Use Color Balance!
Hey folks! After seeing a lot of posts here lately featuring some variation of "Holy crap, this picture is crazy amounts of blue! How do I make it not be that way?" I decided to make a quick, super easy tutorial featuring our friend, color balance.
Today we'll be going from this:
to this:
Poor, poor Jessica Stam. The lighting in this set of photos is quite blue, and while it works in context, anyone looking at it without a reference point would just think she looked like a smurf. But this is easy to fix.
First, I added a little bit of contrast. This step is completely optional because a)it does nothing to get rid of the blue and b)some pictures don't need any contrast added. Just use your judgment on whether your picture needs it. I felt like the photo could use a boost, so I upped the contrast by 12.
Okay, now we're ready to rock and roll. The easiest way to understand the color balance concept is to think of it in term of opposites. Red is the opposite color of cyan, yellow is the opposite of blue, and green is the opposite of magenta. When you add one of these colors you take an equal amount of its corresponding color away. So, to correct this picture you have to move your slider towards the yellow and the red (because we want to get rid of the blue and the cyan). I did the yellow/blue first and moved it 37 points towards yellow. Then the cyan/red slider got moved 21 points towards red. BUT, it took me a lot of little tiny adjustments to get to those settings. You're going to have to fiddle with these until they look right to you. I would recommend just adding a little bit of yellow and red at a time until you get the result that you want. I generally just leave the magenta/green alone, but I slid it 3 towards magenta for this one just to warm it up a little.
Ta-da! She has human-looking skin now! As an added bonus, the red curtain behind her really pops.
I hope that helped some of you. Have fun experimenting!
Today we'll be going from this:
to this:
Poor, poor Jessica Stam. The lighting in this set of photos is quite blue, and while it works in context, anyone looking at it without a reference point would just think she looked like a smurf. But this is easy to fix.
First, I added a little bit of contrast. This step is completely optional because a)it does nothing to get rid of the blue and b)some pictures don't need any contrast added. Just use your judgment on whether your picture needs it. I felt like the photo could use a boost, so I upped the contrast by 12.
Okay, now we're ready to rock and roll. The easiest way to understand the color balance concept is to think of it in term of opposites. Red is the opposite color of cyan, yellow is the opposite of blue, and green is the opposite of magenta. When you add one of these colors you take an equal amount of its corresponding color away. So, to correct this picture you have to move your slider towards the yellow and the red (because we want to get rid of the blue and the cyan). I did the yellow/blue first and moved it 37 points towards yellow. Then the cyan/red slider got moved 21 points towards red. BUT, it took me a lot of little tiny adjustments to get to those settings. You're going to have to fiddle with these until they look right to you. I would recommend just adding a little bit of yellow and red at a time until you get the result that you want. I generally just leave the magenta/green alone, but I slid it 3 towards magenta for this one just to warm it up a little.
Ta-da! She has human-looking skin now! As an added bonus, the red curtain behind her really pops.
I hope that helped some of you. Have fun experimenting!