Harness of white balance the power

Use Camera Raw and Lightroom’s tools to add temperature shifts and fix casts

- James Paterson

There’s more to white balance than getting the whites balanced; it’s about every colour in the image. There are two ways to do this: you can set the white balance in the camera, or shoot in raw and set it afterwards with the same results. The best practice is to set it in-camera, but sometimes this isn’t practical. By shooting in raw, you can leave your white balance to Auto WB, safe in the knowledge that you can tweak it afterwards if necessary.

Photoshop’s Camera Raw and Lightroom offer near-identical white balance tools, either in the Basic panel in Camera Raw or the Develop module in Lightroom. The tools are very simple, but there are some essential tricks to learn that can help you get the most out of them. What’s more, one of the great things about white balance tools is how you can use them selectively in different areas of the photo. With a landscape like the one pictured above, it means we can pull out a touch of warmth in the sky while also correcting the overall cool cast to the scene.

Max the saturation 

Sometimes it can be tricky to determine the right white balance settings, especially if there isn’t an obvious neutral area to sample with the eyedropper tool. A handy trick if you’re struggling is to temporarily slide the Saturation and Vibrance sliders all the way to 100%.