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Colour Balancing with levels
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Let us suppose the camera was set for an automatic white
balance that did not quite work - or worse - was set for
a daylight balance while shooting with incandescent light.
Not to worry.
I have taken the previous picture and imposed upon it
grievous harm. Now we will go through the steps together
to make it well again. This works with scans of old faded
pictures as well.
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Here I have created what many should consider a total disaster. Both
under-exposed and possessed of a nasty colour shift. I have done screen
shots of the red, green and blue histograms and layered them over our
demonstration image. As you can see they are in different places.
With a properly balanced image, the histograms will still have somewhat
different shapes but will pretty much share the same real-estate.
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Correcting the Red Channel
The keyboard equivalent is Ctrl+1.
We proceed in much the same way as we did on the previous page,
except we will deal with the histograms of each channel individually.
It is pretty clear where to put the left triangle for setting
the shadows, but the right triangle is a judgment call. I have
placed it just inside where the graph begins to rise.
In this case, we do not hit "OK", but instead we go
to the Channel drop-down list and select the green channel.
The keyboard equivalent to get the green channel is Ctrl+2.
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Correcting the Green Channel
Use the same procedure as above with the green channel.
Once again do not click "OK" but rather, select the
blue channel.
The keyboard equivalent is Ctrl+3 to call the blue channel.
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Correcting the Blue Channel
Finally, set the highlights and shadows for the blue channel.
As you well may see, we now have a pretty well balanced picture
- at least colour wise.
Until you click "OK" you can easily return to the
other channels and make adjustments. If you need to trim them
a bit, now is the time to do it.
Now you may click "OK"
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Highlights and Gamma
We are back working with the RGB channel mix.
I moved the highlight triangle just a little bit to make the
highlights sparkle. There is still a lot of highlight detail,
but this is a judgment call.
As with the previous example - since it is the same image -
the bulk of the data is on the dark side. I moved the centre -
gamma - slider until it looked right on my monitor. Again a judgment
call.
I was content with my shadows, so did no adjustment on them.
Of course, this varies from picture to picture.
Hit "OK" and do saturation and sharpening as we did
on the previous page - if the image needs it.
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