Wrong WB. Can these photos be recovered?

I accidently set the WB to tungsten while shooting outside and obviously everything came out purple. The files

unfortunately are JPEGs not RAW, could these files be recovered and the WB be corrected in PS CS2?

You can open the JPEG's as RAW through Bridge. Check your preferences, on the Thumbnail portion, you'll see on top a checkbox for "Prefer Adobe Camera Raw for JPEG and TIFF files." make sure it's checked, click ok, right click the file in bridge and you'll get an option to open it in raw.

i'm not sure but i think you may be able to colour correct selecting the middle eye dropper in levels and clicking around the photo.

Could it be as simple as removing color cast? Probably not. Can you post an example?

It's not that you can't correct the balance (which you can), it's that there's less overall latitude in the lower number of bits-per-pixel that a JPG records, and so some tones and hues may suffer during the change. Compared to purple, it's probably worth the trouble, but you'll have to have expect a little loss of color subtlety on skin tones and some other similar artifacts.

Jerry,

 

You can open them in your RAW converter software, but they won't be RAW images, they're still jpeg.

 

You can open the jpegs in your RAW converter and use the color temp adjustment if you're not comfortable using curves in photoshop, assuming

that you even have photoshop. You'll probably find that you must clip your highlights and shadows in order to color balance the photo. You may or

may not find the results ok.

Here's a little example:<div></div>

corrected with curves<div></div>

original shot using daylight balance<div></div>

I haven't found a way to open jpeg in adobe RAW converter. In the Canon RAW converter it just allows RGB adjustments like in

photoshop. So I guess curves is the only was to correct this. And it wasn't a quick click, click. The curves needed a little hand

tweaking...

There's a Color Balance layer you can use-- not as fast, but it's a saver. It allows you to change the Shadows, Midtone, and Highlights seperately, but they all bleed into each other. Allows you nice control, and is easy (IMO) to understand.

Easy with Canon DPP if you have that. Or with Gimp. Just use the WB dropper tool and clikc on areas in the picture that you expect to be mid grey, or white, and you'll soon find a point that corrects the WB.

'I haven't found a way to open jpeg in adobe RAW converter."

 

In ACR for Photoshop CS3 it is a Camera preference setting which you access through Bridge .

 

Bridge > Camera Raw preferences. see the screen shot for setting details<div></div>

Thanks Ellis,

 

I already had that checked, but missed the "open in camera RAW" in the file menu. Using camera RAW I adjusted the color temp

to 100 and the magenta to 41. Added some adjustments in exposure and brightness and black and saturation and the result is definitely better than using curves.<div></div>