This is just a quick tutorial on how to easily remove a color cast from a Raw file using Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop.
For this demonstration I am going to be using a Raw file from a shot of a row of beautiful Buddha statues that I shot the other day. I was shooting in a wonderful temple in Bangkok and with just available light. The light source was natural sunlight shining into where the statues are seated, which is underneath a cloister and with light shining in on them from only one side.
In front of the cloister there was some renovation work on the temple taking place and the sunlight was hitting some green fencing that was being used to close off the construction area.
Unfortunately the light hit this green fencing first before reaching the Buddhas. This then reflected a green color cast onto the beautiful gold leaf coloring of the Buddhas. You can see below there is green color affecting certain parts of the statue’s face, neck, and arms.
If you have dealt with unwanted color casts like this before you were probably taught that desaturating the unwanted color using an adjustment layer can quickly remove it from the photo. Although this may work part of the time, you could end up also removing some of the other color that you still want to preserve.
I will show you what I mean. If you click on the HSL/Grayscale palette in Adobe Camera RAW (4th tab from the left), and you use the sliders on the Saturation tab to try and desaturate the unwanted color, here is an example of what could happen:
In the above example I pulled the Greens all the way down to -100 to remove the green color cast. It did remove a lot of the unwanted green color, but the problem is it did not remove it all (there is still some green on the Buddha’s nose, eyebrow, neck, etc) and it desaturated too much color from the areas where it did remove the unwanted green. This then created some unwanted patches of desaturated gold color in the photo.
So there is a better way and the technique I use skips the Saturation tab completely and moves over onto the Hue tab instead (also within the HSL/Grayscale pallet). There you shift the appropriate color sliders from Hues to remove your unwanted color cast. Since the color cast I was working on here was green, I brought both the Greens and the Aquas sliders each down to -100 and, as you can see in the result below, the green color cast is nearly all removed. You can also see that none of the gold color I want to keep was affected and all the gold leaf color on the statues still looks very smooth and even.
Also, for those of you who prefer to fix issues like this with adjustment layers in Photoshop, I can tell you that I was not able to remove the color cast as quickly and easily as the above method when trying to do it with Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, or Channel Mixer adjustment layers in Photoshop.
Lastly, in my opinion, any adjustments you can do like this to the Raw file itself, rather than to the file once it has already been developed and brought into Photoshop, are much better served. When you make adjustments to Raw files you are still working with all the raw color data, which means it has a wider color gamut than a developed file and it should yield better quality results.
A more dramatic version of the above photo can also be acquired for commercial use here on ThaiFotos.
As always, if you have any questions or comments on this article, please feel free to post them below.