White Balance Your Images with Photoshop

Not all of us have professional light stands and those umbrella looking things to make your scenes look magazine quality. Most of the time we take photos under incandescent or fluorescent lighting which tend to skew the colors in our images towards the orange or green spectrum. Thanks to Photoshop, we can fix some of the color problems with a simple click of the mouse.

Photoshop has so many features that some are just hard to find. For me, the auto white balancing feature was one of those. Believe it or not, I used to manually edited the color balance and various other values until I got the desired output. Needless to say, that was pretty painful. Fortunately for you though, I've found the white balance feature, which is located inside the Levels dialog.

When you click that menu item, the dialog below will appear.

Don't worry about anything on this dialog. It's all confusing and hard to understand. The only things you need to worry about are the three droppers in the lower right corner.

What these droppers do, in my opinion, is magic. When you choose a dropper and click the corresponding color on the image, the picture is transformed, like Cinderella, into a beautiful version of its former self. The one I use the most is the one located on the right. That dropper sets the white point of the image. On my example picture all of the brown behind the ninja star is supposed to be white. That means all I would have to do is select that dropper then click somewhere on the background.

As soon as you click somewhere, the image should change to reflect your click. Don't worry if you screwed up the first time, that's what control-Z is for. You might have to choose a few different places before you get a good result. When it happens though, the result is an awe-inspiring transformation the likes of which I doubt you've ever seen.

I know what your next question is, "I've got this perfect image, but now what am I supposed to do with it?" The answer is simple, anything you want. Let's say I've got some pent up frustration with The Fattest. Maybe I want to throw a ninja star into his forehead. Of course I can't do that in real life without some sort of permit, so I have to use Photoshop to realize my dreams.

I think that about wraps up this tutorial on automatically white balancing photos using Photoshop. Hopefully it will save you some time if you've been correcting images manually like I was. Also, I enjoyed lodging the ninja star into someone's forehead, so if you've got some tension to release, feel free to use the ninja star yourself. You can get the original white-balanced version of the ninja star right here.