Getting rid of a blue cast

[Rosemary]

Hi and Happy New Year Everyone.
Could anyone please give me a few pointers as to getting rid of a blue cast on photos. I am using PSPx5

Rosemary

[photodrawken]

Begin with Adjust...Color...Red/Green/Blue to get a good starting point.

Starting with this photo:

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R/G/B with the blue reduced by -30% gives this result:

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[hartpaul]

I found a good tutorial about correcting casts here:
http://www.the-graphics-tablet.com/color-cast.html

[Kathy_9]

I found a good tutorial about correcting casts here:
http://www.the-graphics-tablet.com/color-cast.html

Very slick. I would never have thought to use those steps to correct the color cast. I just Googled color cast to find some messed up images and it worked really well on them. I recorded it as a script. Thanks.

[LeviFiction]

Another option is using PSP's Color Balance command. In PSPX5 this command was renamed, White Balance.

Using this, with the Advanced options turned on you can select an area of the image that is supposed to be White, Black, or Gray and it will attempt to correct for the color cast automatically. You can then make a few small adjustments. But that isn't guaranteed to give any real decent results. You can use the Smart Select to get the computer to pick a spot for you.

You can also try using the Smart Photo Fix. This has an option to let you pick 3 areas that are supposed to be fully Black, Fully White, and Gray. It then adjusts the color to make sure those points become what they are supposed to be.

You can also use the Color Balance Adjustment Layer (White Balance Adjustment Layer in PSPX5) and add Yellow (the opposite of Blue) to the image using the slider. Or just increase the Red and Green (Yellow when mixed) colors. However, in small amounts.

There are older commands that are replaced by or incorporated into newer commands. While they do the same thing in general to correct the color cast, newer commands have more options, and possibly even a new code base or method of adjusting for the color cast. So the old ones could always offer a different result.

One such older command is called Automatic Color Balance (Automatic White Balance in PSPX5) that attempts to do the same thing automatically. So less control but may yield a better result may be a worse result. I use it when the default one fails. If you go to the View menu and select "Customize" you can access the command in the "Unused Commands" list.

There are other commands you might find interesting.

Black and White points, for instance. This command will let you identifiy 3 areas, Black, White, and Grey and will attempt to correct the color contrast based on this. Not always the best if you don't have an actual control area that you know specifically has to be those three colors. Otherwise you're just guessing at the closest color you can get and overcorrecting for it.

Unlike the two solutions presented before this one, these commands attempt to correct the color automatically and so may or may not create a decent adjustment.

[Rosemary]

Thank you everyone. I am so impressed with the quick replies. Now I shall go and experiment with each suggestion.

Thank you,

Rosemary

[photodrawken]

I'm not at all impressed with the method described in that tutorial:
1. There's no need to apply a blur.
2. There's nothing special about using the "Color (Legacy)" blending mode -- other modes work just as well, such as "Hue".
3. The result is merely a desaturated image.

For those who haven't looked at that tutorial, here's his original image:

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And here's his final result (which he claims is "a big improvement"):

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However, for this image, all one needs to do is use Adjust...White Balance with the "Smart Select" option (as LeviFiction pointed out), placing the white point on the lightest area of the woman's blouse, and adjusting the settings to this:

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to get this result:

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I've experimented with a half-dozen images from the Web, and the bottom line is that there's no one method which works best for every image. And, it's a Very Good Thing that PSP gives us so many options for correcting colour casts.

To summarize my results:
1. The most reliable method (and one that works on the most images) is to use a Levels adjustment, pulling in the black and the white sliders for each colour channel towards the center.
2. The next most reliable method is the White Balance adjustment.
3. For images with a very uniform colour cast, such as photos taken through an airplane window, or objects in deep shade (lit by the reflected light from the sky), or faded photos; using Adjust...Color...Fade Correction can give stunning results.

[Rosemary]

I enclose a sample of the pictures I am working with. I used Photodrawken and Levifiction's method with some success. Afraid I got lost with hartpaul's tut - sorry. I am a long time user of PSP but not very proficient!
I would be grateful if you could have a look at this picture and please explain how you arrived at the end result. Unfortunately I have lots of pictures like the sample to fix. How do you choose the "white" spot in the picture when using the White Balance window?

Thanks again,

Rosemary

[photodrawken]

Hi Rosemary,
I used Adjust...Color...Fade Correction with a strength of 55:

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There are other things to do to the photo, notably correcting the vignetting, but this is a start....

[Rosemary]

Thanks Ken. That looks so much better. Now what is vignettig? See I warned you that I was a novice!

Rosemary

[photodrawken]

Hi Rosemary,

Keep asking questions! You won't be a novice for very long....

Vignetting is the dark area around the edges of your photo. Another way to look at it is that the photo has a circular central area that's lighter. It's usually caused by the camera lens not transmitting all the light through its edges (that's why the pattern is circular) and is usually seen with wide angle lenses, the wider the lens angle the more obvious the vignetting. Vignetting can also be caused by using a lens shade that's too small, so the edges of the lens shade intrude into the image.

Vignetting is really tough to remove from the finished photo. I haven't found an easy way to correct it -- only by hand painting on the mask of a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer, for example. I'd be interested in hearing if other users here have found a better way.

For your photo, I'm thinking now that I'll start with correcting the vignetting first, before correcting the blue colour cast, because correcting the colour cast tends to make the vignetting more obvious. Will post some examples later tonight, but I'll be honest -- I'm not sure if the technique will be something that can be recorded as a script to apply to all the photos you have. We'll have to see....

[Rosemary]

Hi Ken,
Now I see what you mean! These pictures are taken with full zoom (200 mm) of the mountains across Georgia Strait from Vancouver Island. I also have a lens hood on the camera. Could this be the cause?
I shall await your suggested solutions and thank you so much for your encouragement.

Rosemary

[photodrawken]

These pictures are taken with full zoom (200 mm) of the mountains across Georgia Strait from Vancouver Island. I also have a lens hood on the camera. Could this be the cause?

Just a quick response -- a 200mm lens usually doesn't show that much vignetting, and the lens hood (at 200mm) usually won't intrude into the image. Zoom lenses are another story, and in general will show vignetting where fixed focal length lenses don't. Unfortunately, it all comes down to price: the reason some lenses cost a fortune is that they employ sophisticated (and expensive) solutions to problems like that.

P.S., I lived in Vancouver for a couple of years in the late '80s -- that's some of the best scenery on the planet, for sure.

[photodrawken]

OK! I've got something that works.

First of all, here are the layers:

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I built the image from the bottom of the layer stack upwards, so I'll give the layer settings in that order (from the bottom up):

Brightness/Contrast 1 (with a circular black-to-white gradient applied):

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White Balance 1:

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Fill Light/Clarity 1:

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Vibrancy adjustment Layer 1:

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Brightness/Contrast 2:

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Histogram adjustment layer 1:

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And the final result:

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Not too bad, if I do say so myself. There is a dark spot in the center, but not too obvious. Turned out the worst of the vignetting was relatively easy to cure by applying that gradient to the first Brightness/Contrast layer. I think all these steps can be saved to a script (using the History panel) and quickly applied to the rest of your images if they're all the same subject.

[photodrawken]

To even out the tones even better, I added yet another layer (Brightness/Contrast 3):

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with these settings, filling the layer with black and then painting with white and a soft brush (Hardness of "50") at an Opacity setting of "15" to get everything evened out:

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to get the final final result:

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Stop me before I add more layers!