White balance – PackPixel

Adobe Lightroom is a popular photo editing software for pc and mac. It has some amazing features and tools for every photographer. White balance is very important for a great looking photo. It can change the photo mood. After using Lightroom a lot I found this. Here is How to fix white balance in lightroom. After I crop a photo the first thing that I tend to do is fix the white balance of an image in first really the reason why I cropped first is so that I don't have to worry about anything that ends up being outside of my crop in terms of editing and make look better. For example, maybe there was a big red ball over on the side that I cropped out and I would have had to play around with the make look good while editing. But since I cropped it out first I don't have to worry about it. Best Format For White Balance So in terms of white balance, the easiest way to do that is under our basic options. And so there you have in this first sort of block right here. Our white balance options depending on if you shoot in RAW or JPEG and you're editing a RAW or JPEG you'll have different options sort of presets up here in the top right. I believe that Sam mentioned something about how if you are shooting in RAW things like editing color or applying filters or styles or presets while shooting in a camera doesn't matter as much because you can adjust everything later. And that's true and this is an example of where we can use the as shot white balance or we can choose one. This was kind of in the shade so let's see what that looks like. It makes everything a little bit too warm so that's not right. Daylight might look a little bit more natural compared to what was as shot as shot. Looks a little bit cool. So maybe daylight or you can use an auto selection that Lightroom has that tries to make it look proper. Sometimes these don't look good and there are a couple more keyboard shortcuts that I want to teach you right now that will help you out. One is the backslash button. It's the backslash not the forward slash. A lot of people get confused and they email me and say well this doesn't work. It's the backslash where you see the before and after. Before after before while I'm pressing it down. The other is L which allows you to get sort of a simple view of your photo without any distraction. So if I do that then before and after with the backslash that's an easy way to see more clearly. You can also use these buttons at the bottom of this window to do comparisons. Actually this one let's do before and after and then you can kind of just click through and you can change the view split screen or side to side going back here to see the full screen. OK, so those are the presets. Now, none of those was really working that well for me. So I can do a custom white balance with these sliders the way that sliders work in Lightroom as you can either click and drag to the left or right to adjust them. You double click to set it to what it originally was. Or you can hover your mouse over the slider and use your arrow keys going up or down to jump the slider up or down and this is a good way to make kind of fine-tuning adjustments. So that's how the sliders work. Or you can actually click within the number and type in a specific number say you know that. OK we want this to be at 30 200 or whatever then that's going to give you put the white balance temperature the light saying that this light was thirty two hundred. Obviously it wasn't because that looks too blue it was probably more around 50 600 or something like that. And that looks better. So this first slider is with that temperature. And so what does that make you think of. Well your lighting scale your warm your coolness your Kelvin temperature. And so if you go to the left it's going to make it more cool. Go to the right. It's going to make it more orange and warm. So let me undo that. You also have this tent which goes from green to magenta. So sometimes depending on the light source that you're using or even in this example where we were surrounded by green trees and green leaves, it gave the sort of a green tent which you might like but it might not look so natural so you might have to combat that by adding some magenta or maybe you're under some sort of weird fluorescent light and gives that green tint knows that the tint slider is where you can fix that. OK so if I was doing this myself on this photo I would probably slide to the right just a little bit to get back some of that warmth and then maybe play with the tent just a little bit. Going from right to left. Sometimes I like going extreme and then dialling it back so that I can really see what I'm doing and then say oh that's way too much. Let's go back. I don't even know where it started. It started at 19. Just a little bit might help. And again we can go do the backslash before after that looks more natural to me. The other option first selecting your white balance is with the white balance eyedropper right here. If you click this what you're supposed to do is then find something that is white or neutral without colors in your image something that is like a grey that has no color because then you're telling Lightroom that what I'm clicking on is supposed to be white and then all of the other colors around it adjust to that white balance or that white point that you set. Now, this isn't going to work in this image because there's nothing really white. If I click on the green trees for example what's going to happen is everything gets really pink and magenta ish because what we told Leitrim was that this green tree should be white should be neutral it should be saturated and so it makes everything else pink accordingly. It drags it up that tint Slider. I'm going to undo that with the Manzie if I click say Oh I think my teeth are perfectly white. It's close but everything gets a little bit too cool. So this is not a good example for this photo. Let's see if there's another photo with something that is more white. This one. I mean the color. The problem is the white balance auto setting was really good for all of these photos so you don't really need I mean this might be the best option if I clicked the eyedropper clicked somewhere on the street right here and that looks better. So if I do before after and the reason why I click down here on the street rather than somewhere in the light right here which is pure white and you can see when I click that it says cannot set the white balance here. Please click on a darker neutral area because if your image is overexposed that's not necessarily white that's just overexposed and there's not really any information in that part of the image for Lightroom to see and to use similar to down here on this photo if I click up here now it's too bright it's overexposed so you need something that is well exposed white or gray to use this color picker. If you are you know holding up a white piece of paper even here actually this is a good example this wall is white behind us. And because of the vignette and the lighting it looks gray but if I click here it'll make everything look better. A little make the background look white. Actually neutral grey. And then all the other colors kind of fall in line and that's a perfect example of where this looks a little bit too green and a little bit too blue. But using the white balance picker and picking the blank neutral wall behind will looks a lot better. So that's how you adjust and fix your white balance in the next lesson will be looking more at adjusting and fixing the exposure.