The point where your choice becomes critical is when you’re doing commercial product photography, where the color of the product has to be exactly right for sales purposes. Although the Temperature slider’s numbers are displayed in Kelvin degrees (the standard system used to measure the color temperature of light), this is totally a visual call on your part-stop dragging when the image looks warm enough to you.Īlso, if you choose a White Balance preset and then you move either the Temperature or Tint slider, the preset menu now displays Custom, which just means you started with a preset and then tweaked it.īy the way, there’s no “International Committee of White Balance” that stands in judgment of your choice-you choose the white balance that looks best to you for what you’re trying to create. You can tell by looking at those color gradients that the farther you drag to the right, the warmer your image is going to look. For example, if you think your image looks a little too blue (cold), to make your image more yellow (warmer), drag the Temperature slider to the right.
This is easier than it sounds because Adobe added a color gradient behind both of these sliders so you can see which way to drag to get the color you want. These two sliders let you tweak the white balance by dragging toward the color you want. If you can’t find one that’s right on the money, then choose the one that looks closest to what you want, and use that as your starting place. If it doesn’t look right, try each preset until you find one that does look right. If it looks right to you (and there’s a reasonable chance it will), then you’re done. We’ll start with using the presets because this will either make fixing your white balance a one-click proposition, or at the very least give you a good starting place for further tweaking.Ĭlick on the drop-down menu that says As Shot and start with Auto to see how it looks. Okay, now back to actually tweaking our white balance. Find an image whose white balance is off, correct the white balance on both images in ACR, and compare the results. The next time you’re out shooting, change your camera to shoot in RAW + JPEG mode.
JPEG images is not a myth, and you can test this for yourself. However, the fact that white balance adjustments look better when performed on RAW images vs. You can change it using the Temperature and Tint sliders and the White Balance tool (and I use those two the most anyway). When you shoot in JPEG, the white balance preset you chose in your camera is baked into the image, so the only preset available in the drop-down menu will be Auto.īecause of this, there’s a myth that you can’t change the white balance for JPEG images, but that’s not true. When you open a RAW image in ACR, it initially displays the white balance choice you made in camera, but there’s a White Balance preset drop-down menu where you can actually pick your white balance after the fact. But before we get into these different methods, let’s discuss the difference between RAW and JPEG when it comes to white balance. There are three different ways to set your white balance in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR): the Temperature and Tint sliders, the White Balance presets drop-down menu, and the White Balance tool. (Don’t forget these techniques work for the Develop module in Lightroom, as well.) Setting your white balance is one of the most important edits you make in Camera Raw because if you do it right, your color will be spot on, and you won’t have any color correction problems to deal with later in Photoshop.