Adjustment Brush TIP: Why “Painting” White Balance Rocks!

Being able to “paint” white balance is incredibly handy (I do this pretty often in my own work), and here’s just one example of how I use it (and two ways to do it). In the image above, you can see the bride is lit with the setting sun, so her skintone is nice and warm, but most of her bridal gown is in shadows, so the gown ends up with a blue tint when the gown, of course, should be white. (BTW: This happens a lot in sporting events where part of the field is in daylight, and part is in shadows. Players in the shadow part of the field look blue where the players in the sunlight part look normal, and this technique is a perfect fix for that, too!). Here’s how fix it quick by “Painting White Balance.”

TECHNIQUE ONE: Go to the Develop Module; get the Adjustment Brush; then double-click directly on the word “Effects” — this resets all the sliders to zero. Now, drag the Temperature slider to the right a bit towards yellow (the reason you’re dragging toward yellow, is that yellow will offset and kind of neutralize the bluish tint on her gown). Start painting over her gown and as you do, the blue goes away (as seen above). It should look white, so if it looks “too” yellow then just drag the slider a little bit back towards the left (toward blue) until it looks nice and white. In this particular case, it looked fairly white but then it looked a little too reddish, so I dragged the Tint slider away from Magenta toward green just a little bit and then it looked about right.

TECHNIQUE TWO: In this case, since the dress is supposed to be solid white, you can try this technique, too. Paint over the dress the same way you would with the Adjustment Brush, but instead of moving the Temperature and Tint sliders, just remove all the color from the dress by dragging the Saturation slider way over to the left (as seen here) and the bluish tint is gone.

Above: Here’s a Before/After that shows why knowing this technique is so handy. 🙂

Download This Same Image and Try It Yourself
Just drag and drop my image above onto your computer (or right-click on it and choose “Download file”) so you can import it into Lightroom and try the technique for yourself.

Hope you found that helpful. 🙂

Best,

-Scott