My Photographic Process Part 3 - Color Balance

This is part 3 of my photographic process where I discussed sharpening in part 1 and curves in part 2.

In this article, I'll be showing you how I adjust color balance to get the right the color in my photos right to where I remember them.

The first thing you do is open a new color balance layer. Go to your layers window and click on the half black and half white circle then click on color balance.

After you click color balance, the color balance window should open. It looks like this.

Keep Preserve Luminosity checked. This option protects the tonality of the image. If you remove the check, when you move the sliders to the right, it will lighten the image. Try it. You can always click cancel to remove any changes or just delete the color balance layer that's been created if you make a mistake.

When you set color balance, there are three tones you can adjust, shadows, midtones and highlights. I usually go through all three and move the sliders left and right to see how the image looks.

In some cases, I only need to adjust the midtones. Other times, I just need to adjust the shadows. It depends on the photo and what mood I want the photo to be.

Let's start with the midtones for this photo.

In this photo, I'm almost happy with the colors. But I wanted to see how it would look if I adjusted the color balance. So I click "midtones" in the tone balance selection then move the sliders for "cyan/red", "magenta/green" and "yellow/blue". I found that I didn't need to adjust the cyan/red and magenta/green sliders for this photo but I wanted to add a little blue to the midtone so I set the slider to +2.

Moving this made the blue airbag look better without really affecting the yellow.

Next, I click the highlights selection in the tone balance selection.

As with the midtones, I found that I didn't need to adjust the cyan/red and magenta/green sliders. I did move them left and right, but didn't liked the way the photo looked. But by adjusting the yellow for the highlights, it made the yellow airbag looked better so I adjusted the slider to -5.

After that, I clicked the shadows option in tone balance.

Same as the midtones and highlights, I didn't need to adjust cyan/red and magenta/green. But I moved liked how a little yellow to the shadow looked. I removed some of the dark yellows and gray parts in the shadow of the yellow airbag so I moved the slider to -2.

Once you're happy with the colors, click OK and you're done with the color balance.

If you're happy with how the photo looks. You can stop here and save your work. You can save your work as a PSD file (Photoshop file) to keep all the adjustment information or you can save it as a JPEG file. If you save it as a JPEG file, you lose all the adjustment data so you can't undo any work you've done.

I usually save two files, one as a PSD file and another one I do a "save as" and save to JPEG. This way, when I want to go back and edit the photo. I open the PSD file and adjust the existing settings and re-save it as a JPEG file.

There are two reasons for this. One, I preserve the original photo so if I decide I wanted the original unedited photo back, I have the option to keep it that way in case I want to change the overall look again when my mood changes.

Second, if you edit a JPEG photo and save over it, everytime you open and edit it again, you lose the quality. After saving the file several times, you'll end up with a photo that looks grainy or muddy and it will basically be unusable.

The reason for this is JPEG is a lossy format. That means, every time you save an image, it compresses it to a smaller file size. The only problem is, whenever it compresses the image, some of the information is loss.

Usually, by the 10th save, you'll see some degradation on your photo. By the 20th save, your photo will look like it was taken with a 3 megapixel camera.

If you plan to print your photo in the future, you want to keep it as close to the original as possible.

On my next article, I'll show you some extra settings I did with this photo. It's not necessary, but I just felt the photo needed a little more adjustment.