Camera Raw White Balance

White Balance

White Balance has some Custom presets to choose from according to the situation that your image was shot in. This will give you a semi-decent white balance adjustment for your image, but there is a better way. See next steps for the better way of handling white balance.

White Balance Tool

Navigate to the White Balance Tool. (I) is the keyboard shortcut.

Color Sampler Tool

Another tool you can use in combination with the White Balance Tool is the Color Sampler Tool (S).

Setting Markers

While using the Color Sampler Tool, find a place in your image that you think should close to neutral. Also take a look at the RGB readout right under the Histogram to help you find a spot. Once you have found a spot, click to make a little marker on the image.

Setting Markers Cont.

Find a few other places in your image that you feel are close to neutral, and set some markers. As you can see, up in the top above your image Camera Raw is tracking the markers and showing what the RGB readout is for each. Now go back and grab the White Balance tool and click each of the markers that you have made to see which one you like the best. Remember you can always uncheck the Preview button in Camera Raw to see what effect you are achieving.
If you want to continue to adjust, you can move the Temperature slider left or right towards cooler or warmer colors.

A 3rd Method

Now for a 3rd, and probably the best way to do white balancing with Camera Raw. You can see that we have 3 images loaded in Camera Raw that all have similar lighting and color situations. The middle one has a gray card with it and we will use that to set our white balance.

Set a Neutral Point with White Balance Tool

So grab the white balance tool and click in an area that you know should be neutral, just like on the barn, but in this case use the neutral gray on the gray card. You will see even in the previous step that this step is much better and has lost the ugly yellow cast.

Apple/Command

Next we can set these white balance adjustments that we just did for this image to the image right above it. Hold down the Apple/Command key and and select the image above the one you've been working on. Then Click Synchronize.

Synchronize

Once the Synchronize dialog pops up, you will notice that you could synchronize the image with a lot of things. But for this case we only want the white balance, so we tell it to synchronize with only the White Balance checked. Click OK.

Finish

Now you will see that the image above has picked up the white balance adjustments from the first image, and you didn't have to waste the time to do each one individually. So that image is corrected as well and it was a lot easier doing this method than the previous method.

This concludes the tutorial for White Balance Correction.