a few differences. The ACR module in Elements
doesn’t have all the tools that are available in the
full Photoshop version, but the good news is that
it does have the white balance tools. When you
open a RAW file, the main ACR window opens.
There are two separate places to adjust the white
balance. The first is on the right, at the top of the
Basic panel; the second is a color picker on the
top of the window, above the image.
The White Balance control is located at the top
of the Basic panel, as you can see in Figure 11-7,
and is the first thing I correct or adjust when edit-
ing an image. Sometimes it doesn’t need any
adjustments; other times it takes a lot of adjust-
ing. The initial White Balance settings are those
that were present when the image was taken, but
they can be easily changed. The drop-down menu
gives you the following list of presets: As Shot,
Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Tungsten,
Fluorescent, Flash, and Custom.
You will notice that there is no menu choice for
cloudy, diffused moonlight mixed with security
lights, so a one-click fix is not going to be avail-
able for most night shots. The best idea is to get
close with a preset and then do some fine-tuning
with the Temperature and Tint sliders. As you
can see in Figure 11-8, I picked the Tungsten pre-
set. The colors have shifted toward the left edge
of the Temperature slider, and the sky now looks
closer to how I remember it being; dark gray and
slightly miserable. I can now adjust the sliders to
get the colors closer, if needed.Adjusting the White Balance
The white balance is one of the most powerful
controls that you have for correcting or adjusting
the color of your images. The white balance is set
in the camera to adjust for the color temperature
of the light source that is illuminating your
image. Until recently, you could only adjust the
white balance in post-processing if you shot using
the camera’s RAW file type. This was because the
RAW file type didn’t apply the camera’s white
balance permanently; it just kept a note of what
was used when the image was taken, and then it
applied this white balance when the image was
processed and converted into a useable file type,
such as JPEG. It is now possible to adjust the
white balance on a JPEG or TIFF file type, but it
is still easier to do so to a RAW file. This is one
of the main reasons I use the RAW file type for
most of my images, especially those in which the
color of the light is very difficult to measure.
Adjusting white balance in Elements
The white balance adjustment in Elements is not
done in the actual program but in the Adobe
Camera Raw (ACR) module that opens automat-
ically when you open a RAW file in Elements.
This is the same ACR module that is in the full
version of Photoshop and the same module that
the Lightroom Develop module is based on, with