- Readjust the Red values. By now it should be ob-
vious that using the Color Balance adjustment is
a trial-and-error process. Case in point: Now that
I’ve made the green and blue adjustments, I may
not have gone far enough with my initial red adjust-
ment because there still seems to be a discernible
reddish cast to my boys’ flesh tones. Click in the
numerical field to the right of the Cyan-Red slider
and press Shift+� to reduce it another ten points to
–50. (Pressing the � key by itself reduces the value
in 1-point increments; adding the Shift key moves it
in 10-point increments.) You can see the results in
Figure 6-13. At this point, the skin tones are look-
ing pretty darn good. - Switch to the Highlights. We’ve been working ex-
clusively with the midtone areas of the image, which
is probably the best place to do the heavy lifting
for color-cast removal. But you also have options
available to tweak colors within the highlights (the
lightest values of an image) and the shadows (the
darkest values of an image).
The Adjustments panel is set to Midtones by default
because typically you want to be judicious here. You
don’t want to bring out color in either the highlights
or the shadows, and it’s easy to go too far. Notice
that the whites of the eyes and the dark shadows in
the boys’ hair are nicely neutral at this point. But
my older son’s elbow, for instance, has a slight pink-
ish cast to the highlights. At the top of the Adjust-
ments panel, click to select Highlights and move
the Cyan-Red slider to –10, as I did in Figure 6-14. - Adjust the Shadows slightly. The shadows in this
image are a bit dark, and you can see a slightly blue
cast in the shadowy area directly behind my younger
son. So choose Shadows at the top of the panel, and
then move the Yellow-Blue slider to –10. This has
the doubly positive effect of both brightening the
image and removing that bluish cast behind Sammy.
Figure 6-14.Figure 6-13.Fixing a Color Cast 187