White Balance your Photographs in ACR (Adobe PS and PSE)

When I discovered the eyedropper tool for white balancing photographs in the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) editor, it was one of those life-changing moments. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it did make a huge impact on my ability to color correct my photos. I used to get extremely frustrated trying to get the colors to look the way I wanted them to look and that little eyedropper tool seemed like magic. It doesn’t work for every photo, but it does work for many of them.

You may be thinking that this tutorial doesn’t apply to you because you don’t shoot your photos in RAW format and you don’t have the Adobe Camera Raw editor. Don’t go anywhere! If you have PSE 6 or higher or any version of PS (I think) you have the Adobe Camera Raw editor. Plus, you can open JPEG images in the ACR editor! If you shoot in RAW, your photo will have more information (everything that’s captured by the image sensor) so there’s more to work with – and in this case more is definitely better – but you can still do some good processing of your JPEG images.

Still here? Great! This is the photo I’m going to use. I shoot in RAW + JPEG; I’m going to do the edits with the JPEG version of the photo just to show that it can be done . I took this picture yesterday while we were out eating lunch after church. I love that my boys are so intent on reading! The only thing I did with the picture so far is to crop it to 4×6 and sharpen it a bit, although I normally wouldn’t do those steps until after I was done with my other processing.

Original photo, cropped & sharpened a bit

There’s a different process to open the file into the ACR editor depending upon your software. I’ll show the method to do it if you have Photoshop. I don’t have PSE, but I’ve read that you open your editor then select File > Open as, navigate to the photo you want to work with and select “Camera Raw” in the Open as box. If you have Photoshop, open Adobe Bridge and navigate to your photo. If your photo is in RAW format, then you can just open it directly into the ACR editor without using Bridge.

Opening the file from Adobe Bridge

This is what it looks like when you open the image into the ACR editor. The versions vary a bit (this is version 6.3) but the basic functionality should be the same.

The JPEG file opened in the Camera Raw editor

Now it’s simply a matter of selecting the eyedropper tool and playing with it. Basically the way it works (in very un-technical terms) is that it takes the color you select with the eyedropper tool and try to make it the “neutral” color in the photograph. I usually get the best results by selecting an off-white or mid-level gray. Bright white doesn’t work well and neither do darker grays. Usually I just click around in the photo a bit and see what I like best. Here are a few different results from this picture that I got simply by clicking the eyedropper in different places in the photo. Notice how the color is different and the temperature and tint have changed from their default values of zero. The arrow points to the place I selected with the eyedropper and I put a rectangle around the temperature and tint.

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

You can see that I got three very different results by choosing different points to white balance from. I like the third one the best, so I’ll click on Open Image to close the ACR editor and open the photo in Photoshop.

While the eyedropper tool is wonderful for white-balancing a single photo, I really love it when I’m trying to white balance multiple photos. If the photos have a good neutral point to white balance from, getting a similar look in all the photos is as easy as using the eyedropper tool and selecting the same point in all the pictures. For example, if I had taken another photo of my boys outside in the sunlight and I clicked on the same color in the jacket for both pictures, I should get a similar white balance result. It’s really an awesome tool!