White Balance

The first thing you should approach is the photo’s white balance. This setting’s also on your digital camera, but it’s better to leave the camera setting to Auto and make finer adjustments here. Put simply, adjusting your photo’s white balance is the act of determining what areas of the photo should be white, and then adjusting the remaining colors to ensure that those areas are indeed white. For example, if you shoot a photo under a yellow tungsten lamp, all areas that should be white will have a yellow tinge to them, so you should tone down the yellow and boost the blue in the photo to get back to natural colors. In the Image Adjustment area, you’ll see sliders for Temperature and Tint. A photo’s color temperature is how “warm” or “cool” it looks—warm images look bathed in yellow, cooler images have a suffusion of blue. Use this slider only if your photo looks distinctly biased towards one end. A better way to adjust white balance quickly is the White Balance tool—it’s the third from the left on the toolbar. Select it and click on the area of the image that is supposed to be white or neutral grey—the Temperature and Tint settings will automatically be adjusted.