Colour Balance Adjustment Tutorial

Wouldn’t it be great if every photo taken came out right, from shooting, processing to scanning. Unfortunately, it does not always work out that way and you may not be able to return to the same location to try again for quite some time, especially if that is where you spent your precious holiday time. This is when your picture can be saved from the bin by your image editor tool, and there are a lots of features that can help. My image editor tool is Photoshop CS5.

This tutorial on the colour balance adjustment therefore uses Photoshop CS5. Hopefully it will provide a step by step guide on how to create a new colour balance adjustment layer, how to select the tone, how to make the adjustment, and what to do once you are happy with your adjustments. Some features may differ with other image editor tools, but the concept should be the same.

I have used the colour balance adjustment a couple of times now where a particular colour caste has affected certain areas of my photo. The landscape shown below is a classic example of this.

Please note that you can click on any screen shot to get a better rendition and to also flick through the sequence.

You will see that this picture has way too much blue in the highlights, the white snow, and so to adjust this colour caste you can use the colour balance adjustment tool.

Once you have opened up the image, the first step is to make a new colour balance adjustment layer.

Next there will be a pop up screen, just click the OK button.

You will now see the new colour balance adjustment layer on the right of the screen, above your background layer. The layer should be automatically selected, an if not click just left click on the layer. Hopefully you can see in the below screen shot the tone options. This is where you decide which part of your picture needs the colour balance altered, in the highlights, the mid tones or the shadows.

I need to adjust the snow, the highlights, so I click on that tone option. You then move the 3 colour scales just below that, left or right. Your picture, to the right, will change as you move them so you can see what gives you the best result.

I made the largest adjustment to the cyan / red slide & yellow /blue slide. You can then select another tone and make changes there as well.

You can also alter the opacity of the change you are going to make. Opacity specifies the transparency of an element, in simple English this means the degree to which the background behind the element is overlaid. This slide bar is found on the new layer.

Once you are happy with the adjustments you have made, the final step is to flatten the image before saving and closing. The flattening of the image will collapse the layers into one main layer.

Save & close. That’s all there is to it.

Please feel free to contact me with any comments if you think that this tutorial can be improved in anyway.