Question about fix white balance in Photoshop

Hi. I have a question. I have many photos in JPEG. But the problem is that I cannot get the right color at all. If I correct the color of skin tones, the background color become magenta or else. I want to fix white balance in photoshop. I learned some articles but I don’t understand how the gray point changes white balance. I adjust the white point and the black point. But after adjusting the gray point, photos are no changes. Am I doing something wrong and can I not adjust the gray point? Surely there must be some easier way to match the color schemes from one photo to the next? Edited October 18, 2019 by William Michael

Use the centre 'eyedropper' selection in the curves tool to pick a neutral grey colour. The white of a person's eye sometimes works. Or a grey area of clothing, something white in shadow, grey hair, etc. Set the picker at 5x5 average or similar, otherwise the single pixel mode makes colour correction pot luck.

 

If there's an overall colour cast, you can pick it off a 'white' area and swing it through 180 degrees in Hue/Saturation to get the exact complement of the colour. Create a blank new layer with the complemented colour and merge the layer using colour blend.

 

This sounds complicated, but it exactly replicates the use of a colour correction filter on the camera.

[uSER=2403817]@rodeo_joe|1[/uSER] 's solution works in most cases. An alternative solution is shown here.

 

Mike

I think (but I haven't test this) that Rodeo_joe's method is effectively the same as selecting that particular area as "white" with the eyedropper in ACR or Lightroom.

 

It's important to bear in mind that both of these methods depend on having something in the image that you consider to be spectrally neutral. It doesn't need to be white; it can be any shade of gray as well, as long as it is spectrally neutral. If you don't, then the results of any of these methods will be only as good as the area selected is close to spectrally neutral. That's why it's worth having a neutral card, like a whiBal, that you can include in one test shot when WB is likely to be tricky.

 

I do a lot of candids, which means shots in varying lighting with no opportunity to use a whiBal. Even if I am careful, if I compare shots from the same shoot after a first round of editing, I usually find that my WB drifts from shot to shot.

By the way, the dropper method or other equivalents can also be used to correct images that are faded or have shifted colors due to aging. It may not get you all the way to looking like it did originally, but it can often get you into a ballpark where further corrections are easier.

 

Some here have called this the "Ozone System" since it's a kind of post-mortem "Zone System" ;)

An alternative solution is shown here.

Gee. That sounds even more long-winded than creating a complementary filter mask.

 

Here I just hit the 'Autocolour' button in my smartphone's simple editor: