Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Removing Unwanted Color

It’s not uncommon for an otherwise good photo to have a color cast—that is, to have all the tonal values shifted so that the photo’s too blue, like Figure 12-10, or too orange. You may wind up with a photo like this every once in a while if you forget to change the white balance (Section 3.2.2.3), your camera’s special setting for the type of lighting conditions you’re shooting in (common settings are daylight, fluorescent, and so on).

Figure 12-10. Left: In an outdoor photo taken with the camera set for tungsten indoor lighting, you get a bluish cast. You can tell the color cast is off because the whole photo appears dark and dingy.Right: Elements fixes that wicked color cast in a jiffy. This section gives you a complete rundown of all of Elements color cast-fixing tools.

Elements gives you several ways to correct color cast problems:

• Auto Color Correction doesn’t give you any control over how Elements works, but it often does a good job. To use it, choose Enhance → Auto Color Correction, or press Ctrl+Shift+B.

• Levels, as explained earlier, give you the finest control of the methods in this list. You can often eliminate a color cast by adjusting the individual color channels till the extra color’s gone (as explained in the previous section). The downside is that Levels can be very fiddly for this sort of work, and one of the other ways may be much faster ...