Fixing White Balance Picasa

Sometimes my photographs give me fits, especially when it comes to color correction.  Getting the photo to not look too blue, too red, or some other color that has creeped in means I must fix the photograph’s white balance.  Take this photograph of Toby for instance.  It has an orangish-red cast over it.  Most likely from the lighting in the my living room.   I have to fix this photograph’s white balance.  Great, I know what I need to do.  Now how do I do it?

First, let’s talk about white balance for a quick minute. In photographic terms, white balance refers to removing a color cast from a photograph that causes the white portions of the photograph to not be a true white. This is affected by the light source shining on the subject. Different sources of light have different “color temperatures.” Have you ever noticed that many household lights tend to cause your photographs to have an orange tint or taking a photograph outside on an overcast day or in the shade might cause your photograph to have a blue tint? This has to do with the “spectrum” of light that is produced by the light source available when you take those pictures.

Make sense? Sort of? Well, that’s the simple base to the colors of your photograph as recorded by your digital camera. There are all sorts of settings on your camera that can help you correct this as you take the photograph. I would suggest referring to your owner’s manual on that part.

In the meantime, there are a few simple things you can do to fix the white balance in a photo editor. In this tutorial we are going to focus on using Google’s Picasa editor to fix our photograph. This is a freeware program available to everyone.

If you don’t have Picasa, simply type in Picasa in the Google search engine and go download it.  I’ll wait here while you do that.  Spend some time learning to navigate Picasa a bit, then come back here.

To follow along with today’s tutorial, you can use a photograph of your own, or you can use this photograph of Toby.  Either right click on Toby’s photograph above and choose “Save Picture As…” or click on his picture.  It will bring you to my Flickr page where you can download the photograph.

Open Picasa and find the photograph you need to edit.

Look there’s my Toby! Double click on your photograph to “open” it. This will bring you to the editing screen.

Here we are. What we need to concern ourselves is the tool options area to the left of the photograph.

Here is where you can try to fix all sorts of things that may be wrong in your photograph. Today, we want to fix the white balance. This option is found under the Tuning Tab.

The last option in the Tuning tab is title “Color Temperature.” This is where we will fix our white balance. Before we fix anything, let’s see what this color temperature slider will do. First, let’s slide the bar all the way to the left.

Whew! You can see Toby has become quite blue! Egads! That’s not what I want, but it’s good to know what happens. This means sliding the bar to the left will add more blue tones into your photograph.

Now let’s slide it all the way to the right.

Toby is even more orange-y red. Moving the bar to the right will add more red tones to your photograph.

It’s time to try to fix this photograph. There are three ways we can do this.

One way is to click once on that small wand button below the Color Temperature slider. It is the “One Click Fix for Color” button. Once clicked, Picasa will try to determine what the color problem is with the photograph and adjust it appropriately for you. Sometimes, this works great; sometimes it does not.

You can also use the Neutral Color Picker. Click on the eyedropper button and your cursor will turn into an eyedropper. You would then click on any pure black or pure white spot in your photograph. If the spot you click isn’t pure white or black, the temperature of your photograph will not be correct, and will be quite noticeable.

For my photograph, I decided to use the slider bar. Since my photograph was a little too red to begin with, I need to move the slider bar to the left. This will add some blue tones into the photograph and fix the red tones that are overly present.

I normally slide the bar until the photograph “looks right” to me. Does that mean its totally perfect? Nope. But it does look better than before.

Once I’m satisfied with the look of my picture, I click on the “Back to Libary” button above the tool options on the left.

This brings me back to that initial area of Picasa. You can see how I now have two pictures of Toby: one red, one not so red. I need to save my changes. There is a “Save Changes” button that appears above the photograph I have edited.

Click the “Save Changes” button.

Picasa will overwrite your original photograph with the changes. It will make backup the original for you in a new folder called “Originals.” You will find it in the same folder where your picture is stored. Confusing? Sorry, if it is.

Let’s see how Toby looks.

Yup, I certainly like how the edited photo on the right looks as compared to the one on the left. Mission accomplished. Here are larger versions of the photographs for you to compare.

The Original

Toby Edited

This process will work with everything. Including bento pictures. Just follow this tutorial with a bento picture and see how it works out for you.

Be the bento everyone!