Discover the techniques for adjusting white balance, vibrance, and saturation in Photoshop to enhance the natural look of an image. Learn how to use color balance adjustment and vibrance and saturation masks to intensify colors and correct any tint issues.
Key Insights
- The article explains how the camera's interpretation of light can affect the color of an image, often leading to an unwanted tint. This can be corrected in Photoshop using white balance adjustment.
- Adjusting color balance in Photoshop allows for individual colors to be manipulated until the image appears more natural. The tutorial highlights how this is particularly useful for images shot outside where light conditions can greatly affect the color balance.
- The use of vibrance and saturation adjustments in Photoshop can further enhance an image. While vibrance intensifies more muted colors, saturation increases the intensity of all colors, helping certain elements of an image to stand out.
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In this video, we'll be working with white balance, vibrance, and saturation. Let's begin by opening our file.
In this video, we'll be working with the **Coffee Blue Tint.jpeg**. Let's click **Open**. The first thing we notice about this image is that it has a blue-purple tint.
That's because our white balance is off. Naturally, our eyes are able to pick up on whites based on the color of the light around us. However, the camera has to be told what specific color of light is present in the image and adjust for that.
Therefore, in this photo, the camera recognized the light differently than it actually was, and thus the photo appears a little more blue. Luckily, in Photoshop, we can adjust for this. Let's start where we always do and create another layer of our background by dragging it to the **New Layer** icon. We'll double-click and name this layer **Coffee Blue Tint Adjusted**, then hit **Enter**.
Let's also rename our background image and hit **Enter**. Finally, let's lock the original image. Next, with our **Coffee Blue Tint Adjusted** layer highlighted, we'll go to **Adjustments** and select **Color Balance**.
With the Color Balance adjustment, we have the opportunity to toggle between each of the color sliders until we set a color balance that looks appropriate. I usually start with the **Yellow–Blue** slider, as it's often the most impactful for outdoor images. I'll simply grab the toggle and slide it left and right until I find a balance that looks natural.
I'll leave it at about **-22**, then work my way up to the **Magenta–Green** slider. I think it needs to go a little to the left. Finally, with the top slider (**Cyan–Red**), I'll drag that slightly to the left as well. It still looks a little blue, so I’ll shift it more toward yellow and leave it there.
That looks a lot better than the original file. Let's toggle our **Eye** icon to compare, and we can see this is a significant improvement. Next, let's discuss vibrance and saturation.
Again, with our **Coffee Blue Tint Adjusted** layer selected, we'll add an adjustment mask for **Vibrance**. Vibrance and saturation essentially control the intensity of colors in the image. Increasing vibrance boosts the more muted colors without affecting already vivid tones as much.
Increasing saturation, on the other hand, intensifies all colors in the image equally. Let's look at the image and observe what stands out. Currently, the yellow-orange in the fence post behind, the colors around the coffee carafe, and the blue of the tiles are the most noticeable tones.
If we increase vibrance, we’ll see that additional colors start to pop out more, particularly the blues. If we reset this to **0** and increase the **Saturation** instead, we’ll see all colors become equally more intense.
For this image, I’m going to add just a bit more vibrance to help the colors pop slightly. Then, I’ll return to **Color Balance** because it’s beginning to look a bit too blue again. I’ll drag the slider slightly more to the left—maybe even add a bit more red.
Let’s toggle this again to see if it improves the look. Adjusting **Color Balance** is really about fine-tuning to achieve a natural appearance. All right, I think we’ve achieved a nice, balanced look, so let’s save this file using **Ctrl + S**. We’ll add the word “adjusted” to the filename, then click **Save**, and **OK**.
In the next video, we'll begin cropping images.
See you there!