- Five Handy Things to Know Right Up Front about Masking
- Editing Your Main Subject
- What to Do If It Doesn't Work Perfectly
- Getting Better Masking Results
- Better Looking Skies, Method 1: Select Sky
- Better Looking Skies, Method 2: Linear Gradient
- Better Looking Skies, Method 3: Masking Objects
- Better Looking Skies, Method 4: Preserving Your Clouds Using a Luminance Mask
- Five Really Helpful Things to Know Now About the Brush Masking Tool
- Painting with Light (Also Known as "Dodging and Burning")
- The Brush's Awesome Auto Mask Feature (How to Not Mask "Outside the Lines")
- Fixing the White Balance in Just One Part of Your Image
- Retouching Portraits
- Selecting People in Group Photos
- Editing Landscape Images
- Editing Your Background
- The Easy Way to Mask Anything (Not Just the Subject)
- Changing the Color of Something in Your Image (Point Color)
- Eight More Masking Things You'll Want to Know
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Fixing the White Balance in Just One Part of Your Image
This is one of those things you might not think of, but it has saved my bacon more than once (and if you’ve priced bacon recently, well…). The ability to mask or paint color like this can be a real image-saver. One instance where it helps big-time is when you shoot in Auto white balance, which usually works really well unless your subject is in the shade because they’ll end up with a bluish tint (that’s just the way Auto white balance works on your camera). That’s why there’s a Shade white balance setting—it warms the color to offset the blue tint. Here’s how to fix the problem if you didn’t shoot with your white balance set to Shade:
Step One:
Take a look at the image here, where the background color looks fine, but because my camera’s white balance was set to Auto, her skin tone looks bluish. This is where the ability to apply or even paint white balance in just certain areas is incredibly helpful. So, let’s start by clicking on the Masking icon (the circle with the white dotted lines around it, in the toolbox right below the histogram), and then just wait a few seconds for the AI to recognize there’s a person in the photo, because when it does recognize her, we get an extra set of masking features.
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Step Two:
You’ll know when the AI detects a person because you’ll see a circular thumbnail of your subject’s face appear in the People section at the bottom of the Add New Mask panel. If you hover your cursor over that thumbnail, a red tint overlay appears over the person in your image (as shown here). We don’t need to adjust the color for all of her, here—her red hair and dress look good, it’s just her skin tone that looks off. So, in the next step, we’ll narrow things down to just that.
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Step Three:
Click on that circular thumbnail and you’ll get a list of things the AI found on your person—everything from hair to clothes to skin. If you hover you cursor over any one of those items in the list, it will show you a preview onscreen of the area that would be masked (you’ll see the red tint appear as you hover over each one). In this case, it’s an easy choice—we just want her Facial Skin and Body Skin masked (yes, you can choose more than one area at one time). So, turn on the checkboxes for those two (as seen here), then click the Create Mask button, and the red tint will appear over just those two areas (as seen here). Now, anything we do with the sliders will only affect her facial and body skin (not her eyes, lips, hair, eyebrows or anything else).
TIP: Painting White Balance
In this case, we’re going to let the AI select her skin for us, but another method is to get the Brush tool, move the white balance’s Temp slider toward yellow, and then simply paint this color over her skin to make it look right.
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Step Four:
With only these areas now masked, drag the Temp slider over to the right a bit (toward yellow) until her skin tone looks about right. As you do this, the yellow white balance you’re applying neutralizes the blue tint on her skin (as seen here, in the before/after). If you drag to the right and it’s not enough (it still looks bluish), just drag the Temp slider toward the right some more. To get her skin just right, you also might have to add a little magenta as well, by dragging the Tint slider to the right (as I did here). Remember my tip above: you can do this using the AI, or you can paint with white balance. The most important thing isn’t which tool you use, it’s that you take the steps to get the skin tone looking right.
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