hi guys welcome and welcome back thanks so much for joining me today we're going to talk about
the nuances of white balance and how to know if you've got it right or got it very very wrong
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below but we're not talking about that today we're talking about white balance so i've seen loads
of images posted recently with tint issues temp issues and all sorts of other color cast issues
etc etc so i wanted to cover those off today because it is something that can instantly
ruin an image or instantly assist an image if you get it right nobody will notice if you get
it wrong everybody notices it and people like what's wrong with this i don't know
there's a color situation so i've got up on the screen right now uh four images that have issues
going on in terms of their white balance and some of them are very very wrong some of them are only
slightly wrong and these are things i want to run through today so we've got a variety of subjects
human equine canine and a couple of these images are from other people so thank you so much for
allowing me to use your individual images the easiest subject to do this on is a black or a
white or a grey subject 10 out of 10 the easiest thing to do but what if you don't have a black a
white or a grey subject so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use probably the labrador
as our reference image so let me go ahead and go into the develop module of lightroom
we're in lightroom classic you can use whatever program you want to use for this it works the
same in every single program including adobe camera raw in photoshop it works the same in
any photoshop related type of thing any lightroom classic operation it works the same everywhere so
we're looking at the image that we've got on the screen right now what a brilliant photograph and
what we want to do is just assess it so it looks fine the greens are quite nice they're nice and
cool it looks like a good image what do we think in terms of the white balance some people might
be looking at this and saying jess it looks fine well it might look fine but it's not correct
so bear with me a second here the problem is is that most people when they're photographing
in the bright neon greenery that we have out at the moment is that they tend to balance too
cool because the greenery is so horrific in my opinion when it's in its natural color
but that means that we've got a shift in the subject so looking at the subject here
this dog we've got areas of blue and purple going on on the subject and there is just something not
quite right and this area of blue remains pretty much continually so what we can do to get a good
handle on the color balance is we can go ahead and increase the vibrance up to plus 100 and
then increase the saturation to plus 100. by doing both of those you get your best bet in
terms of balancing out the color casts now looking at this we can see a definite blue color cast and
then a definite magenta color cast now not sure if you guys are aware but a chocolate labrador is
ee bb i believe in terms of its genetic makeup and therefore we basically have got a diluted black
kind of red black and therefore what we're looking for essentially is we don't really want any blue
going on and in terms of the magenta the pink and the purple we want that to be more towards orange
than away from that but there is a limit bare with so with our plus 100 and plus 100 put on top
there what we can do is grab our temp and tint sliders and start to maneuver those around now
usually i pick one color first and in this case i'm going to pick the blue so what i want to do is
isolate an area of blue and just look at that just look at that area of blue then what you want to do
is grab hold of your temp slider and start to move it up and what you want to do is go until blue
goes away so that was there right blue went away yes we've got magenta but blue went away
then we want to grab the magenta slider here uh the green one the tint and pull that away
from magenta so we've got magenta here and i'm going to still use this area as my reference i'm
going to pull to the left and what i want to do is go so that there is no magenta but now it's
going a bit cyan so you could balance that with more yellow what i'm going to do is just bring
it back a little bit because a little bit magenta has never killed anyone so with that done then we
drop our vibrance back to zero by double clicking and our saturation back to zero by double clicking
and all of a sudden your chocolate labrador looks like a chocolate labrador now it doesn't mean that
you have to stop there you can definitely go along and go and influence some of these color
tones here but the main thing is that you got out of there most of those color casts so the before
and the after the before and the after and there's no reason why you can't add richness to that using
the color filter now in this case we've got these super bright greens going on and they were in my
opinion nicer in the before never fear we can drop down to our hsl and color situation here
go to luminance pull down the yellow pull down the green head to hue push it right into the blues
and then head to saturation and push that left and pretty much you can push it more if you wanted to
pretty much ended up with a similar green to the before green
maybe a little bit more blue going on in there but the balance on the puppy is correct so using that
theory using that principle you can look at more complicated examples so here we have a chestnut
horse this isn't a keeper in the shot it's just a good one to show our white balance situation
let me increase the exposure of that for you i'm going to push up the fibrin it's
going to push up the saturation now this is a chestnut horse however it should not have
blue on its face so you want to go to an area where you know the color the lips would not be
blue and you want to start to maneuver that up so you want to go until there's no blue
now for me i think there's too much green there we go now do you see how that looks more grey
potentially a little bit warmer there little bit less green about there so from there
vibrance down saturation down oh look at that we've got a chestnut horse we can increase the
temperature there and probably increase a bit of vibrance bit of saturation and we're back
to a correct colored pony the same situation is happening much more subtly in this image so this
image has got a very slight tinton grey horse plus 100 plus 100 and if you go ahead and zoom
in you can see real rich magenta coming through so the magenta needs to shift back to green
and the blue probably needs to shift a bit warmer but there's a lot of green going on
under here she's probably a cast up from the grass
so you want to look away from that a little bit and check out any other areas that we've got
probably a bit green from up here to be fair there we go now we're getting there
so technically that is the correct cut and then that is the correct color for that to be fair
let me just push the vibrance a little bit and we are cracking so what's the same for skin tones but
you've got to do this very carefully for skin tone so pushing your vibrance up to 100 pushing
your saturation up to 100 you can see that we've got this little kid with super orange skin now we
can see that it's super orange because it's super freaking orange uh go ahead and start bringing
down that warmth and you want to keep going until the areas of highlights are nearly desaturated
so now i've got a bit too too red pinky so now i'll go in pink blue do you see it too far right
so you want to go so just taking the main bulk of the color out of there so about
there and then the tint i think actually the tint and the temper are all right let's try that
that is about right a little bit more of the vibrance jobs a good un
so four correctly color balanced images by using two sliders for your plus 100 and then just fine
tuning based on your own interpretation of that color be careful with this if you don't know the
correct colors of stuff or how colors are made up please go do some research on that because it
will help your photography no end if this video has been helpful for you please do let me know
and as always if you can please do press the subscribe button hit the bell icon because
it helps both you and me out and i hope to see you all again really really soon