Quick and Easy Color Correction in Photoshop

Getting the proper colors out of your photographs can be tricky, especially if your light source isn't pure white. This easy to follow Photoshop tutorial will teach you how to correct color aberrations caused by the use of colored or off-white lights.  This tutorial is useful for everyone but is easy enough for a complete beginner.

For this tutorial we shall use this photograph of a toy I have on my desk.  The light source I used was my desk lamp which, being a CFL bulb, emits a light with a slightly orange hue.  This hue has changed the colors of the actual figure and added an overall sepia tone to the image.  What we want to do is remove this orange or red hue and have the photo represent the figure's true colors.

After you have opened your photo in Photoshop you're going to click Image>Adjustments>Color Balance.  You will then be presented with 3 sliders and three check boxes on the bottom.  We're going to start with the Midtones which should be checked by default.

Note: The numbers represented here are what worked for this photo, you may end up with different numbers depending on the photo you're correcting.

The goal here is to remove the orange hue by increasing the amount of Blue and Cyan in the photo.  As you can see on the sliders, Cyan is the opposite of Red and Blue is the opposite of Yellow.  Since we need to decrease the amount of yellow and red in the photo the theory here should be quite obvious.

Adjusting the Midtones should already show a great improvement but we will still want to adjust the Shadows and Highlights as well.  Try to keep a close eye on the colors to keep from pushing the sliders too far.

Click OK and our photo should now look like this:

It looks a lot better already, we can see the Dino's skin tone is now closer to what it should be, his shirt is now much more white and the colors are more distinctive over all.  The only problem is that now the photo is slightly over saturated and won't print out quite correctly.

We can solve this by clicking on Image>Adjustments>Hue Saturation:

The only thing you need to concern yourself with is the Saturation slider.  Sliding it to the left will slowly decrease the amount of color in the photo and sliding it all the way to the left will leave us with a black and white photo.  For this example, I've moved the slider 25 points to the left which has slightly decreased the saturation of the colors in the photo.

It should now look like this:

This looks much better than our original uncorrected photo.  The skin tone is now very close to the actual color on the figure.  The shirt is now almost completely white, the colors on his tie stand out more and the overall photo has a much more pleasing coloration.  The colors are still rich and vibrant and we haven't lost any tonal depth.

This basic technique is simple yet very powerful and can be used to correct a range of problems caused by colored light sources.  It can be adapted to correct photos taken at dawn or sunset, indoors, under fluorescent lighting or any situation where the light source may effect the colors of the subject.

As always, if you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment and I'll try my best to provide an effective answer.  If you've enjoyed this tutorial then please check out the others!