Mixing it up
Q Can I mix white balances together in a single image when I post-process my raws? Lesley Howe
A Indeed you can, Lesley – and doing so can sometimes really enhance a shot. As you’ll know, when you decide on the white balance to use in-camera, you have a colour temperature that’s set for the whole image. On most occasions, this is absolutely fine and will give you the result you want. But sometimes, playing around with the colour temperature on different parts of a scene will give you a better end result. You can do this in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw by using one of the localised adjustment tools, such as an Adjustment Brush, a Graduated Filter or a Radial Filter.
The best way to explain why you might want to do this is to give you an example of when I’ve used this technique successfully. My example photo here was taken very early one morning in Greenland. The rising sun was casting a beautiful warm tone over much of the water, but the sky remained a superb and contrasting blue. Using a Cloudy WB in-camera enhanced the warmth but also muted the blue of the sky and the way it was reflected in the foreground ripples.
In post-processing I have dropped a Graduated Filter over the sky area, then cooled it down to bring that blueness back into the image. I’ve also painted over the ripples with an Adjustment Brush and tweaked Temperature to make them bluer. Now the contrast between the cool blues and warm yellows is much closer to what I saw with my naked eye.