Archives for December 2015

I’d like to begin this post by telling you that the techniques I use for batch-adjusting white balance in Camera Raw can be used for any type of editing. For example, if you wanted to edit the saturation or contrast of multiple photos simultaneously, you can follow the instructions I’m about to give you below. I’ve merely chosen to focus on white balance because it’s a popular topic and extremely helpful to those who take many photos under the same light conditions, such as wedding, portrait and food photographers.

In this post, I’m going to use a few sample photos I just took a few minutes ago. I regularly shoot food photography under two distinct light conditions – one, where the light is too warm and two, where the light is too cool. I’m constantly adjusting white balance for these photos. It’s rare that I ever let a single image go through my editing process without evaluating this setting.

If you would like to follow along, you’ll need a gray card.

The test photos I shot for this project were taken in RAW mode. When using RAW mode, there is more information for Camera Raw to use while editing. It can also edit non-destructively, so it’s of value to take photographs this way. And since cameras don’t apply any sort of auto-white balance adjusting while in RAW mode, it’s perfect for our uses today.

My Sample Photos

Like I said, I just took these random shots a few moments ago. I ran around my kitchen looking for items that were somewhat vibrant in color so any differences in white balance were apparent. This is what I came up with:

If you look at the above thumbnails in Adobe Bridge closely, you’ll see that there are two batches of photos, each leading with photos of my gray cards. The first group consists of photos 1-6 and the second group consists of photos 7-13. I even named the files appropriately.

Now, if you look at the thumbnails again, more specifically, photos 1 and 7, you’ll see that the gray cards look strikingly different. This is because they are under two different sources of light – the warm and the cool.

Batch Editing White Balance

Since there are only two sources of light, I’m able to edit each group of photos all at once. This is the real benefit to using a gray card. There’s no guessing involved. It is what it is. The trick is to take a single photo of the gray cards under that particular light source before beginning any photography. This way, you’ll have a sure-fire neutral color captured under the light source you’d like to edit from.

To edit the first group, I need to select (click and highlight) each photo in that group and then open them all in Camera Raw by clicking the round Open in Camera Raw button in the top toolbar (circled in red).

After editing this first group, I’ll be repeating this exact step for the second group.

As you can see, the gray card in the above screenshot doesn’t look very gray. It looks more like it’s brown. So it only follows that each object photographed under this light conditions has a degree of inaccurate warmth added to it as well.

By the way, if you’re following along and don’t see the column of thumbnails to the left of the center photo, you need to either double-click on the left panel or click and drag it out to the right. The entire divider is clickable.

Selecting the Images

The begin my editing, I want to select all the photos in the left column. So to do that, I’ll select the first image, which happens to by the one that’s currently displaying in the center panel, hold down Shift on my keyboard and then select the last image in the column.

If you look in the left column now, you’ll see that all the images are selected. What this means is that whichever edit I make to the image that’s currently displayed in the center panel will be applied across all selected images. In this post, I’ll be editing white balance, but like I mentioned earlier, if I went ahead and made any other edit to this photo, such as saturation, lens distortion correction or exposure, each of those would affect every photo that’s highlighted in the left column.

Choosing the White Balance Tool

The next step is to select the White Balance Tool from the top toolbar.

It looks like a dropper.

Applying the White Balance Tool

To adjust white balance by using the White Balance Tool, I need to take a color sample of something that’s neutral gray. If I wasn’t using a gray card, I could guess which area of a photo is gray, but since I’m using the card (which is the reason for using it), I can simply go ahead and click anywhere on it. By doing so, the white balance will automatically be corrected in this first photo and every other selected photo. Take a look at the difference.

And if you look closely, all the thumbnail photos have been corrected as well. It’s that easy.

What Next?

From here, I can either save these photos outright or open them in Photoshop for further editing. It’s really up to me. I can even continue on with my editing in Camera Raw.

Batch Editing the Second Group

This group isn’t as much fun. The white balance wasn’t terribly off, so we’re not going to be able to see much of a change. I’ll still go ahead and edit the photos. Let’s take a look at this next group after I launch them in Camera Raw from Bridge.

Now, if I go ahead and select all the photos in the left column and use the White Balance Tool again, we can see the corrected images.

Like I said, there isn’t much of a difference. If we look at the values in of the Temperature and Tint sliders over to the right though, we can see that the temperature has changed from 4900 to 4750 and the tint has changed from +17 to +27. Just because we don’t see much of a difference on the computer screen doesn’t mean there won’t be much of a difference in print or another output medium. It’s better to accurate correct white balance than eyeballing it with the risk of being off.

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Fixing white balance is usually the first area I work on after I open a photo in Adobe Camera Raw. There’s a reason these particular sliders appear at the top of the list of those included in the Basic panel. There’s little you can do to a photo if the actual color temperature isn’t accurate. Once it’s the way it should be, we can continue on to edit our photos.

I do a lot of indoor photography where I use JPEG mode. I use this mode because my camera takes care of the more nuanced settings for me automatically. Since I use most of my photos for online purposes, many of these settings are, how do I say, less important, than they would be if I were to use the photos for print. Computer monitors and smart phones are more forgiving than billboards along highways. Nevertheless, when I use my camera to capture JPEG files, oftentimes it gets the color balance wrong. The reason for this is primarily due to confusion on the camera’s part. Indoor lighting is notoriously known as a tough customer. Oftentimes, the types and temperatures of lighting are mixed and the camera’s auto white balance feature simply doesn’t understand the photographer’s intent. Because of this, we need to adjust white balance ourselves in an application such as Camera Raw.

I want to take a moment to offer a bit of understanding regarding JPEG and RAW camera modes. While shooting in JPEG mode, camera’s tend to attempt to figure out what’s going on. In RAW mode, they leave that up to the photographer. Because of this, while working in something like Camera Raw, we’ll have fewer options available to us and will end up with lower quality photos when editing JPEG files. While working on RAW files, the sky’s the limit. So, if you can, take your photos in RAW mode and learn all that Camera Raw can truly accomplish. That said, in today’s post, I’ll be editing a JPEG file simply to show you the concept of and how to become familiar with white balance.

Also, in today’s post, much of what I want to convey has to do with color accuracy. After I’m finished with that though, I’m going to touch on color look. While editing my photos, I tend to lean toward warmth as opposed to coolness. For my type of photography, warmth is better received.

My Photo

In today’s post, I’ll be using a stock photo that’s got a nice variety of color. While I take my fair share of food related photographs, I quickly gravitated toward the one I’ll show you in a moment because of its wide range of acceptable temperature and color dynamics. Also, it’s enhances well when the color temperature is adjusted which, in turn, will show you how that setting can significantly affect a photograph.

White Balance Drop-Down Box

As I mentioned above, the first task photographers need to tackle is to actually correct any error in white balance. There are a number of tools to accomplish this. What we’ll look at in this section is the White Balance Drop-Down.

In the drop-down box above, there are only two options available. This is because I’m editing a JPEG file that has already had a white balance adjustment applied to it by the camera it was taken with. As I mentioned earlier, if this was a RAW file, there would be many further options.

Currently, we’ve got:

As Shot
Auto
Custom

If this were a RAW file, we’d have:

As Shot
Auto
Daylight
Cloudy
Shade
Tungsten
Fluorescent
Flash
Custom

Almost all of these options assumes the camera didn’t accurately capture the correct white balance. If we focus on the RAW file options for a moment, we can see that if the photo were taken on a cloudy day, for example, and the camera didn’t recognize that fact, it can be corrected by clicking on the Cloudy selection. This will either cool or warm the colors in the photograph. Each of the remaining options are similar to the one I used in my example, where they would somehow alter the white balance and/or tint.

White Balance Tool

For a more accurate white balance correction, we can use the White Balance Tool. This is located in the top toolbar.

The trick with this tool is to use it alongside an area in the photo that’s determined to be of a neutral shade. Oftentimes, this is challenging to determine, especially when the colors are dramatically skewed one way or the other. For this reason, many photographers use gray cards in their photography. Gray cards offer the photographer a point of reference that they are assured is neutral. If you aren’t familiar with this concept, please take a look at this resource:

Get your White Balance Right in Seconds Using Grey Card

I’ve even written a section on this site that talks about gray cards:

Using a White Balance Grey Card

If a gray card isn’t available, you could always try to find a neutral area in the photograph to click on. The issue with this is that some areas are more neutral than others, if that’s even possible. What I’m trying to say is that the more you click around inside a photo with the White Balance Tool, the more you’ll see variations in color.

I’ll show you a few examples. First, I’ll click an area inside of the spoon at the left side of the photo that looks neutral. Here is the result.

As you can see, the value in the Temperature slider stayed at 0, while the value in the Tint slider fell to -24. There’s also a blueish hue to the entire photo.

If I choose a different area to click on – say an area inside the other spoon that sits on the other side of the photo, perhaps the result will be more accurate.

Well that’s not very good. It’s for this reason, I don’t just randomly use the White Balance Tool. I always like to end up with an accurate reading. Gray cards only cost a few dollars.

Next, I’ll simply click into the white of the bowl. I know this is supposed to be white and perhaps we’ll get a better result.

Ah, that’s better. As you can see, the photo looks more appropriate and the value in the Temperature slider has risen to +11 and the value in the Tint slider has risen to +19. This is a good starting point for the next section.

Adjusting the Sliders

For most of my editing, I manually use the sliders to adjust white balance and tint. I know the way I’d like to see the photo and I can easily give it the look I want. And as I mentioned above, for most of my photos, I like them to feel warm.

Since I think the white balance is currently fairly accurate, I can go ahead and move the Temperature and Tint sliders back and forth, until I achieve the feel I’m after. Many photographers take this step after they’ve used their gray card to first correct any out of whack color cast. In this example, I just happened to get lucky by using the White Balance Tool and clicking on the white bowl.

It’s pretty obvious that I warmed this photograph quite a bit by adjusting the sliders. Right now, it looks good, but I would probably go back and adjust things further after I played with a few other sliders and panels. Editing is always a work in progress and one adjustment can easily affect another.

These are the most basic methods of adjusting a photograph’s white balance using Camera Raw. Of course, you’d probably want your camera to handle much of this task, but if, for some reason, you ended up with an inaccurate color cast in some photos or simply wanted to alter their feel, the White Balance and Tint sliders are perfectly acceptable tools to use.

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In today’s post, I’m going to be adjusting some of the sliders in the HSL/Grayscale panel to see what kind of effect they will have on a few example photos. If you aren’t aware, “HSL” stands for Hue, Saturation and Luminance. Let me give you some definitions of exactly what these are below.

Hue – A color or shade.

Saturation – The intensity of a color.

Luminance – The brightness or darkness of a color.

I’m sure there are some more involved definitions out there, but I’m really trying to keep things simple here. And as we go through this post, you’ll see exactly how each of the sliders in the tabs inside of the HSL panel can affect a photograph. First though, let’s take a look at the HSL panel itself.

Saturation Tab

I’d like to kick things off inside the Saturation tab, so if you’re following along, please click into that. If you’ll notice, inside this tab, we’ve got eight sliders. They range from red to green to magenta. The idea behind each slider is to adjust the amount of saturation, or intensity, for that specific color. For example, in our demonstration photo, we’ve got some flower petals that are primarily colored red and orange. I’ll go ahead and lessen (slide to the left) both of those colors.

As you can see, I’ve desaturated the flower petals.

If I reset those two sliders and increase the yellow and green colors by moving their sliders all the way to the right, we can see that the flower stems will become much more saturated.

Inside the Saturation tab, there’s a fairly wide spectrum of colors to adjust, so you can potentially have a far reaching impact if you make the proper adjustments.

Luminance Tab

Let’s mix things up a bit and change flowers. Let’s also head into the Luminance tab to see if we can brighten and darken some colors. Take a look at the screenshot below to view our original flower.

As you can see, we’ve got the same variety of colors to adjust back and forth. If you click between the Saturation and Luminance tabs, you’ll notice a small change. Where the Saturation slider alter the intensity of color, the Luminance sliders alter the brightness of color. To view this clearly, look at each end of the color sliders. Let’s see if we can adjust something.

Besides white, I’d say this flower photo is primarily made up of reds, greens and yellows. Let’s move those particular sliders all the way to the left to darken the colors.

I’d say that actually looks pretty neat. We significantly transformed the visual effect of this photo.

Let’s do the opposite and brighten these three colors by moving the sliders all the way to the right.

Now, instead of darkening those three colors, we’ve essentially “whitened” them. Again, this gives the photo an entirely different look.

Hue Tab

The Hue tab is a strange one in that it gives us the ability to actually change a color. If we have pure red roses, we can change the red color to orange, magenta or somewhere in between. The same is true if we have a flower with yellow petals. Within the Hue tab, we can change the yellow so it’s more orange or green. I’ve used this tab quite a bit and let me tell you that you can come up with some interesting combinations by moving the sliders contained inside.

I found the perfect photo to exemplify what I’m referring to. It’s sort of a purple flower. Take a look.

For this example, I’m only going to adjust one slider – the purple one. This slider gives me the opportunity to change any purple inside the image to either blue or magenta. Let’s turn the purple to blue first by moving the slider all the way to the left.

Wow, I’d say that’s a change. Now, let’s move the slider to the right so our purple flower turns magenta.

I’m not sure which one looks better. I like them both. I think you get the idea here that this is a very powerful tab inside the HSA panel. I also hope I’ve given you some sufficient background into the workings and possibilities of it as well.

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To be honest, I flip back and forth between the “Straighten Tool” in Camera Raw and the same one in Photoshop. They both work pretty much the same way. I guess it depends on my mood. If you’re interested in how to straighten a photo in Photoshop, check out this post:

How To Straighten a Photo Using Adobe Photoshop

If you’re interested in how to straighten an image in Camera Raw, read on.

In this post, I’ll be covering the “Straighten Tool” (Ctrl A) in Adobe Camera Raw. With my example photograph, I’ll show you exactly how to go about fixing a crooked horizon. I’ve got the perfect image too – the sun setting over NYC. If there was ever anything level, it’s the background in this picture.

My Image

First, I’ve got to show you my crooked image. To be fair, the horizon line in this photo used to be level and straight. I purposefully rotated it so it was ultra obvious that our work was actually correcting something. For the rest of this post, keep your eye on the background.

The Straighten Tool

The Straighten Tool in Camera Raw really comes with two parts. One straightens an image automatically and one straightens manually. I always prefer to fix anything I’m working on like this manually because I actually find it fun. Also, if there isn’t a distinct line in a photo, Camera Raw can have trouble discerning which areas it’s trying to level out.

Auto-Straighten

If I head up to the top menu and find the Straighten Tool, I can click it twice to straighten my photo. In this case, it did a very good job.

In the above screenshot, I circled the Straighten Tool. I also left the image with the Crop Tool still in effect. If I wanted to apply the auto-correction, I would simply hit “Enter” on my keyboard or double-click my mouse pointer somewhere inside the crop area. I’m not going to do that right now because I want to show you the manual straightening option first.

Manually Straighten

If I return to the Straighten Tool up top and click just once on the tool, I’ll find that my cursor changes to a small triangle. If I go to one side of the horizon and move the left point of the triangle as close as I can to the actual horizon line and hold down, I can drag over to the other side of the horizon. When I do this, Camera Raw creates a line that extends with the pointer. When I get to the other side of the line I’m attempting to straighten, I can let go, which makes the image look just like it did above with the auto-straighten option.

In the above screenshot, I left the line hanging out in the sky so you could see it. Right after I grabbed the shot, I dropped it in the proper area. When Camera Raw made the crop area, I double-clicked inside of it and here is the resulting image.

I think that looks pretty good.

Rotating the Crop Tool

We do have another option when it comes to straightening photographs in Adobe Camera Raw. This is the one I used to take advantage of all the time, before either Adobe released the Straighten Tool or before I realized it was available to me. Basically, if I click on the Crop Tool up in the top menu and highlight the horizon area inside the image, I can move my mouse outside of the crop area. Once I do that, my mouse pointer will change into a semi-circle, which I’m able to rotate.

As you can see, the moment I begin rotating, a grid appears that lets me see how the crop area relates to the horizon line.

Now, once everything lines up, I can grab the handles of the crop area and pull the sides to the edges so I maintain as much of the photo as possible.

Finally, I’ll double-click inside the crop area again and end up with the straightened image, just as I did in the previous section.

Using the Upright Tool

If you remember back to my post on lens correction, you’ll recall the “Upright Tool.” This is an extremely handy tool that can easily straighten out a horizon, such as the one in my photo.

To find this tool, go to the “Lens Corrections” panel and then the “Manual” tab. From there, you’ll see a small button in the “Upright” section that says “Level: Apply Only Level Correction” if you roll over it. Currently, it’s the center button.

If I click that center button, Camera Raw will level out my photo automatically.

Using the Rotate Tool

Lastly, we can use the “Rotate Tool” to straighten a crooked photo. If we stay in the same panel, but go all the way down to the bottom, we’ll see a small check box that says “Show Grid.” It’s right next to a slider that allows you to adjust the grid box size.

If we check that box off and then go up a bit to the “Rotate” slider, you’ll see that we can drag that slider back and forth in order to rotate the image. This slider, coupled with the grid, makes it really simple to see when the image is level.

After the photo is leveled the way we want, we’ll need to use the Crop Tool to crop out those empty corners.

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