Enable and work with White Balance

- This snapshot is a perfect candidate for a white balance adjustment. It has what I call mixed lighting. You have an open window over here, so you have daylight coming in behind the subject, we have a lamp on over here that has a tungsten bulb in it, so it's very orangish red on her face. Too red for my taste and we're going to correct it with the white balance adjustment. So, here we go. Up to Add, select White Balance.

Now, we have some options in White Balance. This is a fun tool I think. You have Neutral Gray, Skin Tone, and Temp Tint. We'll start out with Neutral Gray and we'll use Auto, and boom, right away, it makes a very nice correction, but we can also use the eyedropper tool if we wish. So, I'll reset this. Click on the eyedropper tool. Go to a gray area, a neutral area. We'll choose her scarf right here and click on that, and I think that's even a bit cleaner.

I like that a lot. Look at how nice these whites and these blacks and these grays are. Very crisp. So, the eyedropper tool, if you have an appropriate tone to click on, can be very powerful. Let's try Skin Tone. So, we'll go to Skin Tone. Use the dropper tool, click on her skin, and that's nice too. Now, it's a little different. You notice that the whites and the blacks aren't quite as clean. It has more emphasis on the skin than on these neutral colors.

So, you get your choice, right? You know, you can play with these. Let's try Temperature Tint. So, we'll go ahead and reset this. We'll go to Temp Tint. Usually when you use the eyedropper tool with Temperature Tint, you also want to click on a neutral area if you can find one. So, here we go, that's pretty nice too. Now, we can open this up. This is the Cool to Warm slider and this is the Green to Magenta slider.

So, if I wanted to, I could take out a little bit of that magenta, if I thought there was a bit too much. I could warm it up a hair. That's after I've done the eyedropper or the Auto tool. You have a lot of control here. So, in the end though, I really was attracted to the Neutral Gray, so I'm going to reset this one more time. Let's go back to Neutral Gray, let's use our eyedropper tool, let's go right here.

I don't know, my eyes just like this. It's so nice and clean. I think her skin tones are fine. You could say they're a tad cool, but in this image, they work for me. This is what I'm sticking with. Now, I think this is such a good tool that I would just add it to my default set. So, I'd go up here to Add, Save as Default, with it open, and there you go. So, that is the White Balance tool. It can be a gem, it is very powerful, it's very well implemented, and it can make your images look quite professional.

Especially those existing light shots that have these mixed lighting conditions.