Carolyn's Purple Tulips

Carolyn ran into one of the dilemma's we photographer's often face. While shooting indoors without a flash, her image came out amber colored. This is a sure sign the image was taken with either AWB (auto white balance) or one of the outdoor white balance settings, like daylight, cloudy or shade.

To correct this amber color cast while shooting, one could:

• use a flash. however, this would result in an image without the nifty shadows and highlights; the moodiness of the image would be less.


• set the white balance (WB) button to an indoor light setting, such as tungsten or fluorescent.

I am often asked if you can color correct an image. The answer is "sort of". Below is Carolyn's image corrected, as well as the corrected version of Alexa's tungsten image. In both cases, it was possible to neutralize the shadow (black) and highlight (white) parts of the image. In both cases, this resulted in a few odd color casts in other parts of the image. In Carolyn's image, the bowl became knock-your-socks-off blue and had to be cut back using the saturation tool. With Alexa's image, the brightest parts of the daffodils got bluish highlights as well.

The moral?? Try to set your white balance for your light source while you are shooting. It is much easier and less frustrating than trying to correct after the fact.