Different white balances

<p>I have this photo, a person in the shade in the foreground, a festival scene in bright sunlight in the background. I measure the foreground at 2864k and the background at 5450k. </p>

<p>Would you develop it with each of these WB's in lightroom and then combine them in PS masking out the appropriate parts of each photo, or would you take another approach?</p>

<p>It's an academic question, the photo is not that good and not really worth this effort.</p>

<p>Personally I'd go with the foreground white balance, as the prominent subject seems to be the person in the foreground.</p>

<p>In Lightroom, using the adjustment brush, paint the "Temp" adjustment in the areas where you want it, using two separate adjustment brushes. Works like a charm in this situation.</p>

<p>Stephen, I would normally do that but in this case the WB's were so different it just looked bad.<br>

Peter, yes this did work, thanks. Perhaps a bit less precision than a PS mask, but much quicker, and in this case with quite good results.</p>

<p>Cool. At some point when it matters, remember that you can vary the feathering on the brush to get an almost-hard edge and you can also set the brush to erase. Very mask-like, although a cobbled together solution.</p>

<p>Here's the Matt Kloskowski video where I first saw this technique: http://youtu.be/pPOcaHTYlHE</p>

<p>Two years ago, I spent two months in Berkeley, California, to take pictures for a book project. For various reasons, most of the action was, on Campus, around noon, with rather large contrasts between sunlit and shadowed picture parts. I used consistently the method of developing two versions in ACR and bringing them into Photoshop proper as smart objects. This permitted me to be quite accurate with masking the two versions together. But, more importantly, I could go back to ACR and re-adjust each version so to get them to fit together more harmoniously, both luminosity- and color balance-wise.</p>

<p>I found out that, most of the time, going to the best balance in either version was not the optimal way of combining them in one picture. I usually let the sun-lit part approach the shadowed part by up to one third of the difference between the two balances. The shadowed part I also changed, starting with +500 in the main balance and -5 in the fine adjustment bar. This seemed to give a "natural looking" overall balance for many pictures.</p>

<p>I do almost exactly the same thing as Emil with special photos from an event, where I have to have good harmonious colors throughout the image. </p>

<p>Often (usually), there will be no time to change the gel on my flash as I move from area to area and the background may change from tungsten to fluorescent to window light, so I am forced to deal with this in PP. My only difference from Emil's approach is that I usually want the color balance for the foreground to be as close to perfect as possible, so I won't compromise when setting the foreground WB, but, exactly like Emil, I'll only bring the background 1/2 or 2/3rds of the way to a perfect WB. More than that looks odd.</p>

<p>One of the tricks that I have found to mask the foreground WB from the background WB is that since my main source of light is usually my flash, and the background is usually a stop or two darker, I can combine a luminosity mask with some quick and dirty area selections and get a reasonable mask to blend the two WBs.</p>

<p>T</p>