Color Correction

When you have an image with a color cast it is often difficult to correct. Mainly because you don't exactly know which colors need to be corrected. This tutorial shows you an easy way to get rid of those annoying color casts.

After the color correction

Before the color correction

Step 1: What color needs to be corrected.

Activate the Color Pick Tool and click in an area of the image that should be (but isn't) white, for example the white of the eyes.
If there aren't any white areas in the image take the most neutral (gray) area of the image.
By doing this you've determent the color that need to be corrected and have set it as the foreground color.

Click on the foreground color and set the Saturation (S) to 100 and the Value (V) to 60.

Step 2: The color correction.

Create a new layer and fill it with the foreground color.
While the new colored layer is active go to Color > Invert.
Change the blend mode of this layer to Overlay.

In most cases the result is not good yet. You'll get an other colorcast.
All you have to do now is to lower the opacity of this layer. The value depends of the image you're working on.

Posted on 21 July 09in categoriePhoto Retouch.

4 Comments »

Online Degrees in Networking July 31st 09 at
The resulting photo is definitely worth the few tweaks. It kept the normal
skin tone and got rid of the original yellow-ish color cast by the light.
Definitely a trick i’d love to master!

[Reply]
Ben Racicot December 19th 10 at
I’m using the Gimp on Windows 7. I do not have any option for this “Foreground color correction”
Can you help me?

[Reply]
Steven E. Newton April 15th 11 at
Can you tell me a bit about why you chose Saturation 100 and Value 60? I’ve been experimenting with the technique and found that leaving the color as is before inverting it, or inverting it first than adjusting S to 0 and V to 33, works nearly as well. I guess I’m saying I haven’t really found anything special about 100 and 60, and in many cases I can skip the adjustment and just go with a straight inversion overlay.

[Reply]
sagnar July 13th 11 at
Kind of convoluted. If you have no grayscale you can always adjust images like this using memory color values. For instance we know skin tone to be a balanced magenta and yellow with cyan being 10-15% of that value. Obviously this image is too yellow, so the first thing to do is adjust the color balance in the highlights, mids and shadows. Adjust levels and screen a second photo over the first.

Like this: http://sagnar.com/color-correction-good.jpg

[Reply]