How to fix color in any photo in one click in Photoshop, camera Raw and Lightroom

Recently I did a video where I showed you guys how to use the nuetralize button (and I’ll put a link to it) to fix the color and any photo. And I got a lot of questions about it. One of them is will this Work in Camera Raw or Lightroom? No,  But I have something very similar which works in Photoshop, Lightroom and Camera Raw.

We will use 2 photos, first image   has a color tint applied for effect (you may or may not like it), but we will remove it as well as a second photo that is really bad .

Click on the adjustment layers in the Layers Panel and choose levels or curves.

The secret to what we’re doing is the eye dropper, just go down, grab the middle eyedropper. Which is our white balance tool.

All you want to do is drop this on an area that should be white, or neutral gray. The whites of the eyes work great.

Click once and boom, the color cast is removed. (The mid tones are now normal, but there is a separate color tint in the shadows and highlights (lets fix those too)

Let’s fix the contrast on this really easily

So we’ve got the three eye droppers. First  you grab the black one.

You want to go to the darkest part of the image.  To find the darkest point, Hold down the Alt or the Option key and drag on the black triangle in a histogram that’ll show you the darkest parts.

So, click with the black eyedropper on the darkest point. (you can see the shadow is a little blue)

The shadows are now fixed, the image may look a little yellow right now, but don’t worry, one more step).

Grab the white one. Lightest point. It’s going to be the background pop on there. Boom.



Contrast and color is fixed.

If it’s too contrasty, well, simply just pull back the layer opacity a little bit, dial it back in, or you can pull in the blacks a little bit and recover the whites a little bit in levels, the video above shows this.

Fix photo color in Camera Raw

Let me show you the second one. So we’re going to choose filter>camera raw

On the right panel, in Basic>White Balance, you will see the eyedropper tool

Find an area once again, which should be white or neutral. Click and that will get rid of the color cast.

Now, the color is fixed obviously, we need to brighten the darks, we will in the next example.

Tip: When fixing color in Photoshop, you can use Layer Blending modes. Duplicate the layer, color correct and then change to Color blending mode, now only the color will change and nothing else.

Fix Color in a photo in Lightroom

Here we are in Lightroom Classic.

Exactly the same thing, what you want to do is go to the develop module, grab that white balance tool,

click, removes the color cast.

And then, of course, we just want to recover our tones a little bit with the exposure and the shadow sliders.

This week was a simple, quick tutorial.  This is not anything that’s even new in Photoshop. It’s been there forever and a lot of people miss it.

I hope you found it helpful. Do you like these simple tutorials? Let  me know in the comments underneath

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Colin

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