Let's take a look at this picture with a retard thinking he will impress some chicks on facebook if he acts all hard and cool with a cigarette in his mouth while wearing 3d glasses.Yes,that's me! We where at the cinema to see The Avengers.It was sick! But the problem with taking pictures in the parking lot at evening is the bluish color cast you might end up with.I don't want to state that I am a true master of color corrections,I find this often times the hardest part of touching up an image.But the basic rule is this.Each color has its opposite,so at the right amount they just knock each other out.Red with cyan,green with magenta,blue with yellow.So basically we would have to add some yellow to knock the blue out.We will create a curves adjustment layer.The reason why I prefer curves is the control we have,while the color balance adjustment allows us only linear control,that means we can drag sliders to the left or right,adjusting curves offers us a lot more control over the end result.
However just a color correction without any local adjustment will almost never be perfect,or at least for me they almost never are.So often times a little bit more work is required.
Method no.1
I will create a curves adjustment layer by hitting the new adjustment layer button at the bottom of the layers panel.It is that half black half white round button.
From the drop down(highlighted with red in the image bellow) I will choose blue.Tho we can place up to 32 points on a curve,as far as I know,I will place only one in the middle,and drag that to the right.This will start adding yellow and it will knock out the blue.I stopped at the point from where the image will start having a yellowish tint.We could obviously add more point to have more control over the amount of blue we are subtracting from the shadows and highlights,but this looks just fine to me.There is only one more thing I want to make,to brighten the image a little bit.
Tho I guess the smartest thing to do would be to do the tonal adjustment first,that means to brighten the image and only after that the color correction,because tonal adjustments can cause color shifts,that will need some color correction but in this case I found that it is ok to do it in this way.From the same drop down I will choose RGB then I will brighten the image by placing a point in the middle and dragging it to the left.Once again I will use only on point since I don't find it necessary to use more.It is just a lame photograph
taking in a parking lot,I guess no fancy retouching is needed.
We still need some local adjustments to correct everything but first I will show an other method as well to correct the white balance of an image.
There is another method that I sometimes use.I used that one in the before and after above.It is a slightly different result,makes the image look like a daytime shoot,So we have a blown out sky,but sometimes this method may be just what you need.
Method no.2
We can use levels or curves for this,it does not matter, as we will be using the eyedroppers located at the side of these adjustment panels and they both do the same thing.I guess I will go with levels.(I created a levels adjustment the same way as shown above with the curves adjustment).
With the use of these eyedropers we can define a black point, a white point or I don't know how to describe it correctly,so I will call it midpoint.We can define what will be neutral grey in the image with this eyedropper.You don't have to use all of them,in fact in Camera Raw and Lightroom we only have one that does all three things.We will get to that just a little bit later.this takes a little bit of experimentation.Since I know what should be white,what should be black and what most likely is grey in the image I can take the eyedroppers and simply click on these areas and see what happens.With a little bit of experimentation I ended up with these combinations:With the white eyedropper I clicked on the cigarette,and with the grey one on the rear bumper of the car.I experimented with the black one as well but it just made the image way to dark in some areas,so I left the black eyedropper alone.
We can still see a little bit of blue on the shoes and on the shady parts of the T-shirt.I tried clicking on those parts with the grey eyedropper but it added a little bit of a yellowish tint to the image.Given the fact that it was sunset maybe that is the way the image should truly look like,with a yellow cast on the highlights,but I like it more without that.Here is one "dirty"method that I sometimes use to get rid of some leftover color contamination.I will create an other adjustment layer,this time a black and white adjustment.This will tum the
image into black and white.I will hit Ctrl+I to invert the colors in the adjustment layers mask.This will turn white into black,and will make the effect invisible.Now with a soft brush and foreground color white I can paint over the areas of interest.
This magicly takes care of all areas that should have no color anyway.But there I see an other problem on the shirt and pants.The shirt has its original color only on the darker areas,the lighter ones are still a little bit bluish,and the pants as well.I will be using the color replacement tool to correct that.There might just be a few people who can color correct an image without having to make localized adjustments as well,but my opinion is that it is impossible to do an all images.First of all we have to merge everything we just did,or I just did into one layer.You could flatten your image but if you have to go back to readjust some setting then you will have to start from scratch.Using Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E will merge everything visible into one layer that will get placed on top of the stack.Next I will take the Eyedropper tool from the toolbox and click on the color that represents the true color of the shirt.
Nested with the brush tool we have a so called color replacement tool.So right click on the brush tool or click and hold and then choose color replacement tool from the fly out.With this tool I will start painting over the shirt and the colors will get replaced with the foreground color that we just selected with the eyedropper.
So yes! my T-shirt happens to be grey so the black and white method would have worked just as good I guess,but will not work on the pants.So once again I will click with the eyedropper to select the true color of the pants and then I will paint over The bluish areas.
Camera Raw/Lightroom
In Camera Raw and Lightroom we only have one Eyedropper for color correction,it is called the white balance tool.I basically clicked all over the place to get a combination that I like.If you watch the area highlighted with red.you will see the temperature and tint sliders move around as you click.That means you could manually correct the image as well by moving these two sliders.
In terms of color replacement camera Raw does a lame job!I tryed with the adjustment brush found in the upper menu.There is a color option where we can input what tint we want to use.I don't know if there is a way that we can actually sample colors instead of just eyeballing it.Anyway I created a color sampler with the color sampler tool and with the numeric RGB value I jumped to photoshop to see what is the according HSB value of that color then I came back and entered the H and S value because there is no B value aswell if you double click the color box,and then I brushed over the pants and it did manage to replace the color in the areas that where not heavily contaminated.But overall a very lame result.I was lazy to make screen shoots of this one.It does not work anyway.But here is just one and hopefully you will understand what I was saying.
