- There may be times when you need to fix
a color cast in an image.
Maybe you have an image that was photographed
in the wrong white balance or it's an old photograph
that you've scanned and you want to correct the color.
Color casts can be any color, and they'll basically look
like there's a film of color over your photo,
and it just doesn't quite look right.
In this example, I have two images,
a raw on the left and a jpeg on the right.
I used my Fujifilm XT1 to photograph a raw plus jpeg
so they were photographed at the exact same time.
As you can see, this was photographed in the wrong
white balance, it's very slightly off color,
there's a little bit of a blue or a cyan color cast
over the entire image, and I'm going to show you
the difference between fixing a color cast in raw
versus fixing a color cast on a jpeg file.
I'll press D to go in to the develop module,
and if at any time you're confused on which photo
I'm working on, look on the upper left
and you'll see either RAF,
which is that Fujifilm raw file or jpeg.
I have both of these images selected
and I also have the auto sync feature set.
I'm going to quickly adjust some of the tones
so the colors will come through a little bit more clearly.
I'm going to increase the exposure
and a little bit of the contrast,
and now both of these photos are set
to the exact same settings.
They may look a little bit different
because one's a jpeg and one's a raw.
I'm going to deselect and let's go ahead
and start with the raw file.
There are a few different ways
that you can correct a color cast.
If it's a raw image, then the most obvious
is going to be with the white balance.
If you have a white or a gray area in your photo,
then the white balance selector tool
is going to be a really big help.
Just click on that little eyedropper
and find an area in your image that is white
or even gray, and click over that area.
More than likely, it's going to bring you
to a much more balanced color.
You may still need to make a few adjustments
in that white balance setting,
but this will get you off to a really good start.
Now let's go to the jpeg and do the exact same thing.
I'll select that white balance tool
and then click in that same location
and it took away that color cast
but it really didn't bring the other colors
back to what they should be.
If I highlight both of these images
and bring them side by side using survey view,
while the image on the right doesn't look bad,
in fact it actually looks kind of neat with that effect,
the raw photo on the left is much more true
to the original colors in that scene.
Now I'm going to open up an old photograph
that's been scanned and it has a significant color cast.
Instead of using the basic panel to fix the color cast,
I'm going to go in to the tone curve.
Then I'll click on the point curve in the bottom right,
and I'm going to focus my attention on the channels section.
If I click on this drop down, I have three
other options, red, green, and blue.
With RGB selected, you adjust all of the colors
at the same time, which in effect,
adjusts the brightness and the contrast of your image.
But if you'd like, you can also select individual
color channels to affect only those colors.
Each of these colors also has an opposite color
on the light spectrum, the opposite of red is cyan,
the opposite of green is magenta,
and the opposite of blue is yellow.
The color cast that I can see here looks green,
so I'll go ahead and choose green.
Then, I click over the middle part of the image
and I'll drag down, it doesn't need
to go very far, just a little bit.
That took out a lot of that green and did a really good job.
Next, I'd like to add a little bit of cyan
to take away some of the red to see what that does,
so I'll choose red from the list,
and again I'll drag down, but I don't
really like what that's doing.
If I go up, it makes it too red,
so I'm just going to reset this specific curve.
To do that, I right click and select flatten curve.
That only affects the channel that I'm currently in.
I'm going to go back in to green,
and I think I'll move it down just a little bit more.
Now if I toggle this panel on and off,
I can see that I was able to remove
that color cast from the image.