Color Correction and White Balance Photoshop

Hey everybody welcome into this Adobe Photoshop tutorial brought to you as always bite vidcom my name is Nathaniel Dodson. If you’re new around here today we’re gonna talk about five different tips techniques tricks that you can use to adjust your white balance and color correct your photos in the Photoshop.

I think we’ll cover some stuff that you’ll enjoy we’re gonna cover it more from our artistic standpoint and less of sort of the scientific II number II stuff that’s the way.

I’ve covered color correction in the past and we’re gonna have a little bit of fun and do it this way this time around so without further ado. Let’s jump into this tutorial and get things started well alright here we are it’s the first time we’re doing the tutorial and tutorial so anytime I need to explain something.

I can just do this and talk to the camera and you can see me like a normal person but let’s take a look at the first thing that I want to cover and that is the gray point using levels curves or the Camera Raw filter to quickly adjust white balance.

Now this is an extremely cool shot as if we totally messed up the weight balance in the camera or something like that a few different ways. We can attack this we can apply a levels adjustment layer here and we’ve got this wonderful gray point eyedropper.

Which you click something in the photo that should be gray it should be a neutral color not have any color cast and a Photoshop will do its best to correct the color in that photo now it did an okay job there. But let’s use curves here and we got the same gray point sample or let’s sample up near the corner and there we go maybe. We got a better sample point that time you can do it with curves.

I’m gonna delete curves the other thing we can do is apply a Camera Raw filter directly to the layer by going filter Camera Raw filter and here in the Camera Raw dialog. We have this little eyedropper right up here the white balance tool and we can go ahead and do the same thing and you can see it changes up our white balance quite a bit.

Now it’s a little extreme here we may need to reduce that exposure just a touch and look at the beautiful color. If I just do a quick undo you can see a drastic change or if I went the wrong direction undo redo and we made a huge difference.

Now for a shot like this obviously we have this gray background I gotta get used to this we got this gray background. So it makes it very easy to sample something that I use when I’m shooting my photos or tutorial are a set of something like this the use of slap sticks and these have if you see some gray bits here and this should always be a neutral color obviously.

So you can use these gray little tick marks on something like slap sticks or you can get a much less expensive gray card something like that. You just have your model hold for one photo under that light and you can sample and make sure you get perfect color balance. It’s really the fastest easiest and most effective way to do that that’s what I would recommend and if you’re shooting your own photos you can do it in this case.

We have this gray background that we know was gray so that makes our job a little bit easier alright on to color correction technique number two. Now this technique is to use hue/saturation and you may not think of hue/saturation as your traditional color correction tool, because it kind of isn’t but what it’s great at and we’re gonna kind of use it.

You know in a dumb way here but the the idea behind it is what makes sense. Let’s say we’re looking at this and we don’t want to shift the hue of the entire image because the model just looks bad.

So I’m going to reset that instead maybe I just want to target like the Reds and say you know what the Reds really should be a bit more orange or maybe they should be a bit more pink whatever. You think they should be maybe here this should be a couple ticks closer to orange just a little less saturated right and then before and after we’ve made our color editing in Photoshop.

Let’s just hit the little reset arrow you can also use a little finger scrubby slider and you can click and drag any area. Now just clicking and dragging is going to adjust the saturation which again we don’t really want to do. But if we hold down the command or control key then we can adjust the hue.

so here I could just click kind of on her forehead typically. I try to work with diffused highlights, so not the brightest part definitely not a shadow just sort of a diffused highlight ignore the big crosshair. There on her head that’s just from the eyedropper sampling tool and holding down command and just clicking and dragging.

We can just tweak and adjust the color just in that one particular area and if I shut off you saturation there it is before and there it is after. So we just neutralized a little bit of that red pinky color cast and of course in this case.

I say that it’s kind of a dumb usage of the tool and the reason that is is because it’s probably the style of the photo but again the principle stands true alright. Now here the third technique that I want to cover is using selective color.

So the selective color adjustment layer is right here and by the way all these adjustment layers. You can apply more destructively by going image adjustments and you have all this stuff here adjustment layers are just kind of a better way to work.

So the cool thing about selective color is you can really hyper target. I’m gonna deduct the properties panel here again you can really selectively target any of these colors but not only the colors also tones.

So I’m looking at this photo and the first thing that jumps out at me is a lot of the highlights on the skin and also back here in the building they have this pinkish reddish. You know just magenta cast to them I want to see what it would look like if we infused a little bit of green and yellow into the highlights of this image.

So let’s go down to the whites first and foremost and we’re gonna say hey we want to put the opposite of like blue and purple into those highlights. So we’re gonna say get rid of a little bit of that magenta and also introduce a little bit of yellow just a little bit. We don’t want to go too much so like negative 10 plus 8 I can do a quick before and after.

You can see how much we change the entire color of our scene without really affecting all this stuff in the foreground right the color of his jacket the color of her jacket her gloves the hats none of that stuff changes. Just to the color cast and the highlights we neutralize just like that so that can be a really nice way.

If you see a color cast and put only in a particular part of the image also the same stands true in the blacks. Let’s say maybe we think there’s too much red in his jacket well cyan is the opposite of red. So we’ll just pump a little cyan into those shadows and just watch his jacket here when I shut this off So there it is and there it is with the cyan adjustment to the shadows.

The yellow and green adjustment to the very highlights and of course you can play with neutrals as well. We can say just get rid of some of the magenta overall and also a little bit of the blue overall in the image just very slight adjustments there’s before and there’s after look at how much of a difference something very simple like that.

We can make to your image alright and technique number four is going to be using the color channels in the levels adjustment layer incidentally technique number five is going to be using the color channels in the curves adjustment layer.

But let’s look at levels first so this is a photo I shot of friend of mine down in Atlantic City next to a now abandoned casino. We want to make this much more of a sunset looking image the lights that we were using and well frankly I just didn’t set the white balance correctly.

So we want to make this much warmer underneath your RGB composite channel you have your reds greens and blues and the opposite of red is cyan the opposite of green is magenta the opposite of blue is yellow. So right off the bat I know probably what I want to do is infuse more yellow opposite of blue and also more red.

So let’s work with blue first because obviously blue is kind of the dominant color here and I can boost my my black output slider. You can see what this is doing moving a lot of blue into the darker parts of the image I don’t want that I actually want to push a little yellow into the brighter parts of the image. But you can see part of the problem with pushing yellow into the highlights like this is you tend to get this really fake.

I don’t know plastic looking yellow I’m not really a big fan of it instead what I want to do is open up this portion of levels by moving my center slider over toward the white point.

So you can see we’re infusing all of this yellow but what it’s doing is it’s giving us this really kind of ugly yellow green cast in the shadows. So let’s try to counterbalance this up here in the green in the green channel by shifting this over a little bit maybe we’ll boost the I’m sorry not the black point.

We’re gonna boost a white point here and we’re gonna push the black slider up a little bit right. So you can already see there’s before there’s after and maybe what we need is a little bit more red so we’ll try to push a little bit of red into this.

Now pushing the red into the shadows a little unnatural I think so I’m gonna try to just open up ma. I’m gonna open up the highlights a little bit here push this over and maybe I’ll overcook this just a little bit.

I’m gonna push cyan here into the shadowy parts and there’s before our levels adjustment there’s after. So this is a little bit of just understanding that red cyan green magenta blue yellow recognize that they’re opposites figure out.

What you want to do with your image in terms of infusing a certain color or color scheme into it and you can just go in and play with the image until it looks good. So we shut off levels there’s what we began with and here’s what we have now but shut off the levels I’m gonna leave the levels in case.

Now you don’t I’m gonna delete levels we don’t need to keep it around and the fifth and final technique I want to talk about is using your curves adjustment. Now one of the cool things about curves adjustment and one of the cool things about a lot of these things but curves in particular.

I’m going to open up my info panel here and we’re going to grab our eyedropper tool and I’m going to drop a couple points.

So again I’m looking for diffused highlights so let’s go like right here on the edge of the highlight and we have our RGB color readout here one twenty one against one twenty one ninety two against 92 and 96 96.

Now I tend to prefer working with CMYK when I’m doing my color correction it just seems to be more accurate I’ve kind of sort of grown up working on CMYK. If you will and and again the colors are the same cyan magenta yellow they’re just the opposites of red green blue RGB see my they’re just polar opposites.

So I’m looking at this and I’m saying look I want to reduce cyan and I want to boost yellow in my photo. So as we kind of push our levels around we can watch the second stack of numbers is going to be our updated or updated color that we’re measuring here on her forehead.

So we’ll go down to our blue channel again and with curves we can push or pull if we push up we introduce a lot more blue into the image. If we pull down we introduce a lot more yellow so we can just watch this.

So we can say alright we’re pushing a lot of yellow here into her skin but you know what I want to sort of keep tabs on what’s going on in her hair. So I’m gonna hold down shift and drop a point in her hair I kind of want this to I sort of want all these numbers to be the same I don’t want there to be a strong color cast in her hair she had this brown hair.

If anything maybe like a drip of reddish auburn color but I definitely don’t want this heavy yellow cast right like a blue a low blue count means we got some yellow going on in there. Because remember yellow is the opposite of blue so what I can do here in my curves panel with the blue channel select that I can grab the finger scrubby tool.

I can hover over that point and I can say look I want to either pull blue out of that or in this case I want to push blue into it. So I want to push a little bit of blue into it and as I do that I can look around here and see alright.

Now out here we’ve got some crazy stuff happening too much blue. So I can pull down to get rid of some of the blue over there and you can really go back and forth on the image and do a lot in terms of what you want to do with pushing these colors around.

So here I’m going to lift the overall amount of yellow that I have in the blue channel and then I need to go over to Red’s. So here what we’ll do is we’ll try to push a little bit of red into here. So again I’m using the finger scrubby tool and I’m going to click on her forehead I’m going to drag it upward to introduce red and that’s pretty nice.

We just add a nice little tone to her skin and then let’s try coming in here to the Greens. Let’s see what happens if we add green I’m not a huge fan if we add just a little tiny bit of magenta that adds kind of Red’s her up a little bit too much.

So let’s go back to the red and I’m going to manually select the point and drag it downward a little bit and if we shut off curves there’s what we had we turn on curves.

Here’s what we have now so curves and you pair it with the info panel and dropping a couple points using the eyedropper tool. Just you shift-click and then shift drag those points and you can drop them out into the great abyss out here and it’ll just get rid of them for good.

You can quickly change the color and the mood of your photo editing and of course you could come in here with RGB at this point and just say look I want to introduce a little bit more contrast. Just slightly pop the image something like that and the beauty of adjustment layers of course reduce the opacity a little bit.

If it’s a little bit too heavy and settle in for your perfect final finished photo. So there you have it those are 5 tips and techniques that I like to use for color correcting and adjusting the white balance in my own photos. I’ve really been enjoying using these tools and techniques lately over the past maybe year and a half and it’s really served me well.

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