Need WB help

Pindy

DavidTO suggested I post this here, in response to a need for some PS White Balance fix help:



Image has been processed according to the basic "make your image pop" tutorial on dgrin. Where can I take it to the next level color and tone-wise?

DavidTO

Hey, Pindy, sorry I didn't see this sooner.

So what you've got in this shot is mixed light. It's subtle, but it's there. The two kinds of light are the direct sunlight and the skyight, the blue reflected from the sky.

For my money, the most important issue from a white balance standpoint is that I'm pretty sure that the plane is not blue, but a neutral.

The more yellow of the direct sun might fool your eye into thinking that the shot has the proper WB, but the blue plane ruins it.

It's an easy fix, in levels or curves, just select the neutral eyedropper (the gray one) and click on the plane. Bingo, the plane is neutral, and the entire shot is more pleasing, IMO.

jfriend

One more step
To add to David's retouch. Since I'm pretty sure this is taken in sunlight (there are shadows), I did the same thing David did (gray eye dropper to neutralize the plane color) and then added an S-curve to increase contrast and raise the mid-tone brightness.

DavidTO

jfriend wrote:

To add to David's retouch. Since I'm pretty sure this is taken in sunlight (there are shadows), I did the same thing David did (gray eye dropper to neutralize the plane color) and then added an S-curve to increase contrast and raise the mid-tone brightness.

Yep, that's better.

Take a look at the "Pop" tutorial, linked in my signature for more help with this.

Pindy

Wow, both of those are nicer, warmer, generally more pleasing. JFriend—you did a contrast curve on top of my own, so I'm not sure if I would be able to get that much out of my initial curves foray.

So... what's the deal with the gray dropper? What is considered "neutral"?

Also I seem to prefer Curves to Levels. Is there anything about Levels that should make me not ignore it for curves?

Pindy

jfriend—a curves screenshot would work wonders!

jfriend

Droppers and curves

Pindy wrote:

Wow, both of those are nicer, warmer, generally more pleasing. JFriend—you did a contrast curve on top of my own, so I'm not sure if I would be able to get that much out of my initial curves foray.

So... what's the deal with the gray dropper? What is considered "neutral"?

Also I seem to prefer Curves to Levels. Is there anything about Levels that should make me not ignore it for curves?

You can use the gray, middle eye dropper on any part of the image that is supposed to have equal R,G and B values. You can use it on something that's supposed to be 7,7,7 (nearly black with no color) or 220,220,220 (nearly white with no color) or anything in the middle like 128,128,128 (a middle gray). I used it here on the body of the plane because it appears that that is probably supposed to be white (which is neutral). The gray eye dropper automatically adjusts the R, G and B curves to make the point you clicked be neutral (equal R, G and B values).

The white point eye dropper adjusts the curves so that the point you clicked on is "white" which is somewhere around 255,255,255 but could be a little less than that if you configure PS for a different white point.

The black point eye dropper works similarly. It adjusts the curves so that the point you click on becomes black.

I rarely use the white point and black point eye droppers because I find I like manual adjustments better for white point and black point, but I use the gray dropper all the time to try to neutralize a color cast from some known neutral reference in the image. Just remember you can use it on any item in the image that should have no color (any shade of gray). It will work better if the item you click on isn't an extreme shadow or an extreme highlight.

Curves are a superset of levels so if you are more comfortable in curves, you can completely ignore levels with no loss of functionality. The end-points of the curve are the same as the end-points in levels. Adjusting the midpoint of the curve is the same as the mid-poiint in levels. Obviously curves give you the ability to change the shape of the curve rather than just adjust three points.

Here's what my contrast curve looked like. I moved the white point in (top right point), added an s-shape to the curve to increase the slope in the mid-tones and adjusted the mid-point of the curve for a mid-tone brightness that looks good. With curves, the greater the slope of the curve, the higher the contrast in that tonal range. An s-curve sacrifices contrast at the ends (flatter slope) in order to increase contrast in the mid-tones (higher slope) which is often a useful tradeoff.

Pindy

Brilliant—thanks. Learned so much here in a few short weeks already.