Colour Cast

Hi there to all,

I thought to quickly put this discussion together to make a suggestion about colour cast that not many people know about.

Just about every digital image taken with a digital camera has a colour cast in it and it is important to remove the colour cast and do some processing in the image. In my opinion, the most efficient software to use is Photoshop CS/ CS2/ CS3. The way this is done is to load your image into Photoshop and apply a levels adjustment layer. When the dialogue box opens, you'll see 3 eye droppers - Black, neutral gray and white. First grab the black eye dropper and find a part of the image that has black or almost black in it and click on that part. Then select the white eye dropper and click on a part of the image that is white or as close to it that you will get. You can look at the foreground colour swatch in the tools palette and it should give you the actual colour you have selected. Then lastly, choose the middle eye dropper, neutral gray and try and find some neutral gray and click on it. Once again the foreground colour swatch will indicate if you have chosen a gray colour. Once you have done this, you will notice that the colour cast will be gone and your image will appear sharper and clearer.

Hope this is of some help to people out there.

Tags: tips

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Permalink Reply by Miss34 on June 27, 2008 at 6:33am

Wow, this makes the photo SO much better! I've always wondered how to make photos more realistic without completely altering it with editing.
Love this tip!
Thanks!

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Permalink Reply by John McTarnaghan on June 29, 2008 at 2:51pm

This process also works in Photoshop Elements 5

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Permalink Reply by John McTarnaghan on June 29, 2008 at 5:15pm

That is really a great improvement

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Permalink Reply by Stevo on June 29, 2008 at 4:07pm

I have been going through all my old photo's removing the colour cast using this technique recently and it is unbelievable how much the snaps improve. I can't speak highly enough of this technique.

It's a bit of an extreme example, as the original is photographed through the window of a london eye capsule (so it's really bad!!), but i've attached a "before and after" of a photo i'd taken just to show how powerful the photoshop colour correction is.

Attachments:

DSCF0040.JPG, 560 KB
DSCF00400.jpg, 1.1 MB

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Permalink Reply by Kelly Kiefer on July 1, 2008 at 2:13am

Stevo, that is a huge difference. Looks nice.

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Permalink Reply by Johnson Zhang on June 30, 2008 at 5:20am

Great & easy-to-follow tutorial!
Really appreciate it!

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Permalink Reply by Rory Mole on June 30, 2008 at 10:46am

Hi there Douglas,
Thanks for the point you raised. That is absolutely correct. My point is that sometimes, the colour cast is just too much in some cameras and removing colour cast in some conditions will actually enhance the image.

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Permalink Reply by Rory Mole on July 1, 2008 at 6:23am

The auto Colour option does do a small correction, but not as good as doing the colour cast removal through an levels adjustment layer. The auto colour option scans the whole image and tries to balance it out, but the results are not that good.