Color balance in photo editing
2 min readPublished on: Mar 3, 2020
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For all the photographers and editors out there aiming to achieve that one perfect picture, you might be aware of color balance. While enhancing the picture is one thing, retaining its true essence and colors is what holds value. Read on to find out what is color balance and its importance in photo editing.
What is color balance?
in layman words, it is adjusting the intensities of Red, Green and Blue colors in the picture. A picture shot through a camera might differ from what you see through the human eye! The camera lens most of the time fails to capture the real essence of the subject, even with every setting accurately tuned. Therefore in the post processing stage, you might want to restore the colors as you saw them. This is where color balance comes into play. It is a part of color correction technique and along with white balance, gives you your perfect shot! Whether you want to keep it realistic or give it a dramatic flair, that is your choice. But nonetheless, it is important to give life to the picture and that is done through color balancing.
Learn about color cast
The Automatic settings in the camera favor a particular color while clicking the picture and this gives a color cast over the whole picture. Color balance removes the color cast to reveal the true colors of the picture (quite literally!). The color values can be adjusted in photo editing softwares and photo editing apps. Adding shadows and highlights at the right place makes your picture pleasing to the eyes. When modifying these color values, it is also important to balance the neutral colors as well, such as white and grey, which is called white balance .
