WORKING WITH RAW FILES
T
o a camera, daylight is blue and indoor light is
orange. When shooting in various lighting
conditions a camera’s Auto White balance (AWB)
setting attempts to get white details in the scene
looking white. If the camera balances the whites correctly
then the resulting photograph will be tint-free and display
the true colours of the scene. However, sometimes a photo
will still look too cold or too warm (as is the case in the
starting file for this tutorial).
In chapter 4 we demonstrated how to correct colour
casts in compressed JPEG files. This can involve using an
eyedropper to sample areas that should be a neutral white.
If the sampled white is tinted blue then the eyedropper will
warm it up to make the white look white. This will correct
the colours in the rest of the shot at the same time. You can
perform the same colour-correction trick in the Camera
Raw editor. The raw editor also enables you to step back in
time and experiment with different in-camera white balance
settings (such as Daylight) to produce more natural-lookingand tint-free colours. This enables you to overcome easy-to-
make mistakes such as using the wrong white balance preset
while on location, as you’ll see in the steps below.Remove colour casts
Counteract a colour cast in a raw file using White
Balance presets or the one-click White Balance tool
2
Fine-tune the temperature
The Auto preset drops the colour temperature from
5200 to a cooler 3650 degrees Kelvin. The skin tones
look more natural, but are now a little too cold. We can
fine-tune the colour by manually increasing the Temperature
slider to a slightly warmer 4500.1
Auto White Balance
Open ty_elements29.dng. The raw file will open in the
Camera Raw editor. The model’s skin tones appear a bit
too orange, so we’ll need to cool down the colour a little for
better skin tones. A good place to start is the White balance
Presets menu. Set it to Auto. This removes the warm tint.BEFORE
GET THE START FILES HERE: http://bit.ly/type-files