How to Correct White Balance Tutorial Part Two: Adobe Camera Raw

This lesson continues what we started last week in our tutorial for correcting white balance in Adobe Lightroom. It’s not necessary to read it for this lesson, but the techniques are similar given Lightroom and Camera Raw share the same engine. To quickly recap, correcting white balance is where image correction and improvement should logically begin, thus I figured it’d be a great place to start workflow tutorials. Fortunately Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) make it pretty easy to do, but they don’t necessarily provide the full power that Photoshop can bring to white balance and color correction. But that’s for the next lesson.

For Camera Raw, I’d typically start by finding the images via Bridge. In the image above I’ve navigated to the images in need of correction. Click to expand the images to a larger view.

With the images selected, go to file>open in camera raw, or command/control R, to open the images into camera raw. Note you don’t have to just work with RAW files in ACR. TIF and JPEG are also available for processing, but as always, your best bet is RAW. RAW has more recoverable data, and editing them is non-destructive.

Once inside of ACR, your tool of choice will be the white balance tool. You can access it at the top toolbar, or by pressing the shortcut key (I), or finally, by holding the shift key down while hovering over your image. This image is too warm, possibly shot on the “cloudy” white balance setting on the camera. I like images to be warm, but I also like to start with accurate.

Now for the tricky part, where to click? Unlike Lightroom, ACR provides no preview of what your click might look like. But under the histogram ACR provides RGB values to help guide you (a neutral target would have closely matching RGB values, though don’t expect to find perfect matches). The goal of course is to find something presumably neutral in your image. If you were to click on the grass or sky, your result would be quite scary, and deserve an immediate undo. So what I like to do is find a shadow on a white surface, here clicking on the shadow on the girl’s white sweater. The results are pretty good right off the bat.

Next tweak the correction by adjusting the white balance slider to the left or right. The slider includes a handy reference: blue/cool to the left and yellow/warmer to the right. We just barely nudged to the right to bring a bit of the warmth back. I know I’ll get more creative in Photoshop, so for me this image is white balance corrected. If needed you could now adjust exposure, recovery, etc…

To correct multiple images taken in the same light setting, select the appropriate images on the left, then click the syncronize button. This brings up the above dialog box, with options to choose which adjustments to “sync”. Here they’re all selected, which works just fine in this example. Once you hit OK, you’ll notice your additional images will now reflect the adjustments you applied to the first image. Use this to your advantage to save loads of time in the future, by pulling multiple images into ACR at the same time, using one as a reference for the others.

Finally to bring the corrected images into photoshop go down to the open image button. I prefer to hold the option key down while doing so, which changes open images into open objects. This opens up your images into photoshop as smart objects, allowing you to edit and if desired go back into ACR at anytime to further tweak settings. Very cool.

So that’s correcting white balance in Adobe Camera Raw. Pretty easy once you get a feel for where to click with the white balance tool. Next lesson…color correcting in Photoshop. That’s a fun one.

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