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How to Correct White Balance Tutorial Part One: Lightroom 2

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Posted by Patrick on Feb 8, 2009 in Tutorials

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Since the last poll requested more tutorials, I thought a great place to start would be at, well, the beginning. And the place where all image correction typically begins, whether working in Lightroom, Camera Raw, or Photoshop, etc, is white balance. Modern cameras are pretty good at getting white balance right, but indoor lighting, flash photography, and mixed lighting can overwhelm the best of cameras, even I’m afraid, the Canon EOS 5D Mark II.

There’s another thing about white balance that can be tricky, and that is that what looks correct to one person can be very off to another, in other words WB is very, very subjective. Part of that is perception, but another aspect is that in general most people prefer warmth to coolness, just as most will prefer saturation to unsaturated. So sometimes what looks right isn’t 100% percent right.

The point is, setting white balance is more art than science, but with that in mind, over the next 3 tutorials, I’m going to show you how to correct your white balance in Lightroom 2, Camera Raw, and finally Photoshop. My aim is to help you get your images to a relatively accurate WB, though I fully realize that’s just a starting point. You might decide later to get creative with your WB, but I always like to think that it’s nice to have an accurate starting point. One more thing, correcting white balance, is just one of many reasons you should be shooting RAW if at all possible. Correcting WB on a RAW file is non-destructive, not so with JPEGs. These tutorials will work for both file types though, still if you can, shoot RAW.

With that in mind, we begin with correcting white balance in Lightroom 2. You can click to expand the images, and generally items of interest have been circled for emphasis.

Here’s our starting point. We’ve already taken the image into the Develop module by hitting (D) on the keyboard, or by clicking on (develop) on the module picker panel. As you can see, we have some white balance problems, with the image being far too cool. Since correcting WB is usually step one, Adobe wisely places the white balance settings at the top of the develop panel. In the white balance panel, click on the eyedropper or simpler, hit the (W) key on the keyboard.

The aim here is to use the eyedropper to click on a neutral target. For the industrious, prior to shooting your model, you could have held up a neutral gray card, which you could then use as a target, but that obviously isn’t always practical nor all that spontaneous. Luckily, the white balance tool provides you a little help with an expanded view of the pixel sample the eyedropper is hovering over, and with RGB percentages to determine neutrality of color. Here, I’m hovering over the red stripe in the background. I can tell it isn’t a very good target for two reasons. One, the RGB values aren’t very close (neutral), and second, if you look in the navigator window (upper left-hand corner) Lightroom convieniently shows you a live preview of what clicking on that point would result in, and as you can see, a definite color cast. Let’s find another spot.

Here I’m sampling on the fabric in the background. Again, judging by the preview, this isn’t what I’m really aiming for. Moving on…

Finally, I’m sampling the shadow on the white t-shirt. Sampling pure white objects usually isn’t going to be helpful, but here we have a shadow on white that has a distinct color cast. The white balance tool aims to remove our color cast, and judging by the preview, clicking here will produce the intended result.

Here’s the correction. As you can see, much better, the cool color cast is gone, with just one click! It isn’t perfect, perhaps a pinch too warm, but a great starting point.

Time to tweak a little bit. The corrected version was just a wee bit too warm for my taste, so here I’m using the temperature slider and dragging it to the left just a tiny amount. At this point, the image is white balance corrected, though I might go into the color sliders to adjust skin tone for additional accuracy. Still, given the starting point, this image looks significantly better already.

Before I go on, as an alternative to the eyedropper, Lighroom provides a menu of white balance options like those found on your camera, daylight, cloudy, shade, etc (unless your image is a JPEG). You could start with one of these and then use your slider to make adjustments, or just the slider completely. I find the eyedropper/slider combo to be the best fit for me.

Now to exploit the power of Lightroom. If you’ll notice in the filmstrip (bottom left hand corner) I have two additional images taken at the same time. Thanks to Lightroom, I’ll be able to use the settings I just used to correct this image to correct the other 2.

For a better view of the difference, with all the relevant images selected in the filmstrip, I’ve gone back to the library module and put the pictures into survey view by hitting the (N) key, or by clicking the survey button. Clearly one of these things doesn’t look like the others.

Back to the Develop module (D), with all the images selected I’ve clicked on the (sync) button at the bottom of the develop panel (it says (previous) here, because in using the shift key to take screenshots it changes the (sync) button to previous…but trust me). Clicking (sync) brings up the synchronize settings menu. I’ve clicked (check none) to clear all the settings, then clicked “white balance”.

Now click the (synchronize) button.

A quick glance at the filmstrip shows some changes have been made. So back to the library module for a viewing.

Presto! Taking the images to survey view (N) in the library module shows that our corrected white balance settings from the first image have been applied to the subsequent images. Not bad for a couple of clicks.

So you can see, Lightroom makes it easy to adjust white balance and even better apply those settings to other similar images by using the sync feature. In our next tutorial, I’ll be showing you how to correct white balance in Adobe Camera Raw, and after that Photoshop. Stay tuned.