Unnatural hues result when the camera's automatic white balance cannot assess the lighting conditions properly. This is more likely to occur with artificial light, but can also happen when certain combinations of sunlight and shadows are present (like in the sample used later in this workshop article). The outcome is photos with an undesirable color tone, such as blue or red.

Easy to do…

This workshop will walk you through the steps of removing a color hue. To follow along, you can click here to download our sample photo from our web site.

To import the sample, drag the downloaded .SLI file from the Windows Explorer or the StudioLine Explorer "My Computer" to your image archive.

Detecting Unnatural Color Hues

• Choose "White Balance" from the toolbar to open that image tool, which turns the mouse pointer into an eyedropper.

• Either in the image viewer or on the thumbnail, move the eyedropper to an area in the picture that you know should in fact be gray or silver, no matter how dark or light. (In our sample image, we marked three such spots for you. Just point the eyedropper in the center of one of the red circles.)

Viewing Component Color (RGB) Values

The "White Balance" panel continuously shows the share of the red, green and blue components at the current spot. The intensity for each component color is represented as a number between 0 (dark) and 255 (bright).

In the screen shot above, we positioned the eyedropper on the air intake frame. To be a perfect gray, the frame should have three identical values for its component colors, e.g., an RGB value of 135|135|135.

The RGB value at this spot, as illustrated below, turned out to be 112|134|159 instead. The blue color component is higher, thus giving the air intake frame an unnatural blue hue.

Removing a Color Hue

• After locating a supposedly gray spot in an image with the eyedropper, simply click the mouse button. StudioLine will correct the color hue for the entire image.
• If you are not satisfied with the result, click the button "Pick up Gray Point" on the White Balance panel to turn the mouse pointer back into an eyedropper. You can now click on other gray or silver areas in the image.

As always the case with StudioLine, you can easily copy the white balance settings to other images that might be affected by the same hue.

Have fun giving it a try with one of your own pictures. You'll be amazed how brilliant your pictures will turn out.


Photos: © 2006 Andreas Birner