White Balance

Did you ever take a picture on a winter day and realized after that the snow is kind of blueish? Or someone's face turned out to be a little red than it's supposed to be?
This happens because common digital cameras (whitout the manual white balance option) have some difficulties in setting the correct temperature of the white point.

Let's take for example this picture:


It is obvious that the colour cast is unrealistic. The colour blue is predominant, and that's bad. Let's fix this in Photoshop CS4, in a couple of seconds. The are many ways to do it, and i will show you how to do this using Histograms. Open the image above in CS4, then open the Histogram Windows by pressing Ctrl+L. Make sure that the Preview box is ticked, then click on the middle eyedropper (the gray one). The next step is to find a gray point in the picture (a point that is supposed to be gray). Just click on any of the rocks, for example.


Now, the image looks just like the one below. More life-like, isnt't it? You can apply this method to any picture that has bad colour cast. For example, if the snow isn't white, just click on the middle eyedropper and then on the snow.