Adjusting white balance

You can often improve a photo dramatically by adjusting the colors. Different types of lighting, cameras, and the processing that occurs inside the camera can cause incorrect coloring in photos. Scanned images may have unnatural color casts.

To create natural-looking colors and remove any color cast in your image, you can use the various color-balancing commands in Corel PaintShop Pro. By applying the commands to a selection or an entire image, you can do the following:

• tonally balance a photo’s colors without affecting the luminance of the photo

• increase or decrease the red, blue, or green color channel by a percentage of the given channel

• create a photographic negative by replacing each pixel color with its opposite (for example, replace blue with yellow, black with white, yellow with blue, white with black, and so on)

• adjust the amount of red, green, and blue in your image as a way to make color corrections by changing the overall color cast

This allows Corel PaintShop Pro to evaluate and make minor corrections to the image automatically.

3 Drag the temperature slider to the left for cooler colors (more blue), or to the right for warmer colors (more orange).

If you know what color temperature the photo should be, you can set precise tonal balance values by marking the Advanced Options check box and typing or setting the temperature values in the Temperature and Tint controls in the White Balance group box. You can tweak the colors by adjusting values in the Temperature and Tint controls in the Enhance White Balance group box.

• To maintain a color image, select a color channel to edit from the Output channel drop-list.

• To change the image to monochrome (which looks like grayscale but has a color depth of 16 million colors), mark the Monochrome check box. Grey appears in the Output channel drop-list.

3 In the Source Channels group box, type or set values in the Red, Green, and Blue controls, or adjust the corresponding sliders, to change the percentage of that color in the channel.

For example, if you are editing the Red channel and set the Red control to 50%, the amount of red in the image is reduced to 50% of its original amount.

The slider is originally set at zero. If you want to darken the color channel, drag the slider to the left. If you want to brighten the color channel, drag the slider to the right.

Drag in the Before pane to center an important part of the image (such as a face).

2 Adjust the value in the Amount of correction control until the image looks the most natural.

Note: Use the minimum value that produces a good correction. If you apply too much correction, highlight and shadow areas may lose detail, and objects may blend together.

2 In the Red, Green, and Blue controls, type or set a value to change the percentage for each color.

A value of 0% preserves the original value. To add more of a color, use a positive number. To remove some of a color, use a negative number.

Note: Reducing the amount of blue adds a yellow cast to the image, reducing the amount of green adds a magenta cast to the image, and reducing the amount of red adds a cyan cast to the image.