manual white balance

[justleesa]

Does this look better? I just used curves to lower the red and masked it to affect only the areas where it was needed.

By the way, I don't know why it happens, but I'm surprised it doesn't happen much more than this. You're telling your camera to add in enough red to make your white-balance target perfectly white. It takes a lot of red to do that. Why it would be restricted to one side or corner I have no idea.

Hey great! can you do it in PSE too?

 

[alcina]

mandrake -

Can you give some tips or a workflow for masking? I have tried to use it but find I am not very good at it. What tools do you use and how do you select your area? I have PSCS

 

[Dee]

Does this look better? I just used curves to lower the red and masked it to affect only the areas where it was needed.

That looks great! Can I do that in PSElements? How do I mask an area?

 

[mandrake]

Hey great! can you do it in PSE too?

I don't see why not, if my memory of PSE holds true. What I did was:

1) create a duplicate of your image layer, change the blending mode to color (this way you only affect color and not brightness/contrast)
2) create a levels or curves adjustment layer that is clipped to the layer you created in step 1 (In PS you do Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Levels... or Curves... and click on 'Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask')
3) Then you create a mask over the reddish areas. I use the Gradient Tool to do this. The mask should be strongest (whitest) where the red is most intense and fade away to black where the red is not a problem. You may need to study up on the use of the Gradient Tool to create masks like this.
4) Then in the Levels or Curves layer you just decrease the red. In curves I took the Input/Output 255/255 point and moved it down to about 255/192 or so. In levels you'd probably just take the Input Level that reads 255 and bump it down to the point where the red disappears.

When you're familiar with the steps it takes about 2 minutes to do.

 

[justleesa]

I don't see why not, if my memory of PSE holds true. What I did was:

1) create a duplicate of your image layer, change the blending mode to color (this way you only affect color and not brightness/contrast)
2) create a levels or curves adjustment layer that is clipped to the layer you created in step 1 (In PS you do Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Levels... or Curves... and click on 'Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask')
3) Then you create a mask over the reddish areas. I use the Gradient Tool to do this. The mask should be strongest (whitest) where the red is most intense and fade away to black where the red is not a problem. You may need to study up on the use of the Gradient Tool to create masks like this.
4) Then in the Levels or Curves layer you just decrease the red. In curves I took the Input/Output 255/255 point and moved it down to about 255/192 or so. In levels you'd probably just take the Input Level that reads 255 and bump it down to the point where the red disappears.

When you're familiar with the steps it takes about 2 minutes to do.

I'll get back to you in a couple'a hours...lol
Thanks for the great help!

 

[mandrake]

Here's the step where I create the gradient mask. (By the way, in my previous post I had the wrong advice for the levels tool -- you should move the 0 point up to about 50, not the 255 point down, which makes the image more red, not less).

Note here that I have a foreground color of white and a background color of black. The gradient tool options I'm using are 'foreground to background' (in other words, white to black) and 'linear gradient'. See the mask I created -- it's white in the lower right hand corner and then fades away to black. To get this, I had the gradient tool selected and then I clicked in the lower right corner and drew a line out up and to the left about 2/3 of the way across the image. This is really hard to explain, even with the picture.

 

[Dee]

Well....What I ended up with had absolutly no resemblance to yours! That gradient mask thing started my down fall. I saved your steps so I'll keep working on it!

 

[Dee]

How do you get the small windows with the layers and levels to stay on the screen? Mine are only availble by looking for the right one on the task bar but it goes away when you click on a layer.

 

[mandrake]

How do you get the small windows with the layers and levels to stay on the screen? Mine are only availble by looking for the right one on the task bar but it goes away when you click on a layer.

I'm pretty sure it works differently in PSE and PS. I don't still have an installation of PSE handy, and don't remember how it organizes stuff like that.

 

[Dee]

I found it...sort of. I got the layers pallete on but it doesn't have the curves like yours and I only have an undo history. Probably a PSE thing.