lighting conditions can often make it difficult to get the colors of your photos looking quite
right so in this video I'll share five techniques you can use to color correct an image in Affinity
photo look at this photo of a color Checker card that I shot in direct sunlight now compare it
with a similar photo taken at the same time but in the shade notice how blue the image shot in
the shade appears color Checker cards like this are a great tool when you're shooting a batch of
photos in the same lighting conditions you simply include the color Checker card in the frame from
time to time then you can open the raw file in the Affinity photo developer Persona and use the
white balance tool you'll find it in the tools palette on the left of the interface a common
understanding when using the white balance tool is that you need to click on a white object in
the photo instead use it to click on something that should be a neutral gray color let's open
the white balance panel in the basic controls so that you can see the effect of the tool watch how
the sliders change when I click on the mid-tone gray square of the color Checker card we can see
that it adjusts the temperature and tint sliders to turn the square I clicked a neutral gray color
once this image didn't have any obvious problems if we view it next to the corrected image we can
see the Improvement now that I know these settings I can apply them to other images
that I shot at the same time providing that is that they had the same lighting conditions
let's switch to the other image now which I shot in the shade you can see that the camera's Auto
white balance has already applied a higher temperature value but it isn't enough to
correct the blue color cast watch what happens when I click the mid-tone gray Square for this
image now we see the correct white balance which uses a temperature setting that's off the scale
here's a side-by-side comparison where you can see the difference to the original but not every
photo that you'll want to color correct will be a raw file sometimes you're starting with a JPEG or
Tiff image and editing it in the photo persona because the photo Persona doesn't have a white
balance tool we'll need to use a different technique the first thing that I'll do is to
duplicate the image layer because this correction will apply changes directly to the image pixels
now we could take this pixel layer into the develop Persona and use the white balance tool but
if we didn't want to do that we can apply the auto white balance filter in the photo Persona you'll
find the filter in the filters menu under the colors section it's also in the toolbar along the
top of the screen assuming you haven't moved it notice that when I apply the filter there aren't
any controls and the changes are made directly to the image layer if I hide the layer you can see
the effect it's having now for our third method of correcting the colors in this image which is
the white balance adjustment layer this time I don't need to duplicate the image layer because
this is a non-destructive edit to add the white balance adjustment layer I can use the layers
menu and select the new layer adjustment section alternatively I can click the adjustments icon
at the bottom of the layer Studio panel and select the white balance option I can then
adjust the white balance and tint sliders until I achieve the correct white balance for the image
let's reset the sliders now because there's also a Color Picker that I want to demonstrate
after clicking the Picker button I can click on something in the image that I want to be neutral
this may seem easy but there are a couple of limitations or problems to be aware of
first it can produce different results depending on how dark the area is that you select
watch what happens to the white balance slider as I click the different gray swatches along the
bottom of the card notice that the darker gray panels produce a warmer image than the lighter
ones the second problem is that the Picker only affects the white balance slider it's not having
any effect on the tint slider if you need to introduce more green or magenta to the image
you'll need to do it manually judging the amount by eye let's turn this layer off though because I
want to show you the next technique that you might want to use this is the color balance
adjustment layer which we can also select from the adjustment icon what's good about this method
is that you can use it to Target the highlights mid tongues and shadows with separate adjustments
it works by mixing the proportion of six colors in each of the three tonal ranges for example I can
select the mid tones for this image then when I move the cyan red slider to the right it increases
the proportion of red while reducing cyan this is extremely powerful but it can be difficult
to correct an image like this instead it's better suited for adjusting images where you might have
different problems in different tonal ranges if we look at the shadows in this Sunset we can see
too much blue we can therefore select the shadows and move the yellow blue slider left this removes
Blue from the Shadows whilst adding yellow this though produces too much green in the Rocks so we
move the magenta green slider left this adds magenta to the shadows and reduces the green
note to the highlights which appear to Orange because they contain a lot of magenta
to fix this we move the magenta green slider right causing the highlights to become yellow
then finally I'll switch to the mid tongues which is where I need to highlight something
about this tool the tonal ranges aren't strictly defined but instead merging to each other because
of this your mid-tone adjustments will affect the highlights and the Shadows let's reduce the Scion
now increase the yellows and add some magenta back if we compare the starting and adjusted
images you can see the Improvement the color balance made the difficulty with this method
comes in understanding how the controls affect the image colors which does take some practice now for
the final technique where I'll use this old faded photo you may have seen me restore this image in a
previous video where I also use this technique it involves applying a levels adjustment layer which
we can add from the layers Studio first I'll select the red color channel in the drop down
list I'll then drag the black level on the left so that it meets the edge of the red histogram
then I'll do the same with the white level so that it just touches the other side of the histogram I
can then switch to editing the green channel in the drop down now I'll repeat the process with
the black and white level moving them to touch the ends of the histogram finally I can switch
to the blue Channel and make a similar adjustment using the black and white levels notice that this
corrects the discolored black and white photo and fixes the fading at the same time but what's
special about this last technique is that you can also use it to color grade photos as I explained
in this video thanks for watching today if you've enjoyed the video please share it with others
and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already I'll see you soon for another video