iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Color Balance

If all you ever shoot is black-and-white photos, then Exposure/Levels or Brightness/ Contrast may be all you ever need. If you’re like most people, though, you’re also concerned about a little thing called color.

One of the most common failings of digital cameras (and scanners, too) is that they don’t capture color very accurately. Digital photos sometimes have a slightly bluish or greenish tinge, producing dull colors, lower contrast, and sickly looking skin tones.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONBattle of the Sliders

All right, first you said that I can create a well-balanced histogram with the Exposure and Levels sliders. Then you said that the Brightness and Contrast sliders do pretty much the same thing. So which should I use?

Photography forums everywhere are overflowing with passionate comments advocating one approach over the other.

The bottom line is, for most normal JPEG photos, you can use whichever you prefer, as long as you wind up creating a histogram whose peaks generally span the entire graph.

If you have no preference, you may as well get into the habit of using the Exposure and Levels sliders. One day, when you begin editing super-high-quality RAW files (page 91), you’ll appreciate the clever way these controls interpret the data from the camera’s sensors with virtually no loss of quality.

In fact, the whole thing might have a faint green or magenta cast. Or maybe you just want to take color adjustment into your own hands, not only to get the colors right, but ...