HOW IT WORKS WHITE BALANCE

Adjust a photo’s colour temperature to counteract warm or cool colour casts

01 Before and after

When you’re adjusting an image’s white balance, it helps if you can compare the edited version with the original – you’ll often find that an image’s colours look okay until you see the difference that selecting a different white balance setting makes. To do this, click and hold on the Multi-Preview icon and choose Compare Before and After Images. This will enable you to see the image’s original colours in the left-hand pane.

02 Metadata

Before you start to correct a photo’s colours it can be helpful to check which white balance setting was used to take the shot. The Shade setting will warm up colours to counter the cool quality of shaded light, for example, while Incandescent will cool down warm artificial lighting – so if you select Incadescent when shooting outdoors you’ll capture images with very blue colours. The metadata pane enables you to discover which white balance setting was used at the time of shooting.

03 Edit pane

If you shoot in RAW, this pane enables you view and adjust a range of camera settings, including the white balance preset used for each shot. By default the white balance will be set to Original, and your image will be displayed with the setting that you chose in-camera applied.

04 White balance presets

If you’ve used an incorrect white balance preset in-camera and need to change it, or if you just want to adjust the white balance to create a different feel, you can experiment with the various presets in this drop-down menu, which correspond to the presets on your D-SLR. Our unprocessed example image has rather cold-looking shadows, so we could try warming them up by using the Shade preset. However, in this case the Shade preset will make the warmer-looking, sunlit parts of the building look too orange.

05 White Balance pane

After clicking the white balance icon this pane appears. Its drop-down menu also gives you access to various white balance presets (such as Direct Sunlight), but you can also apply a more suitable custom white balance by using the Gray Point Sample tool.

06 Gray Point Sample tool

You use this tool by clicking on a tone in your image that should be white or grey. Capture NX-D will warm up or cool down that tone to create neutral whites or greys, and the same adjustment will be applied to colours throughout the image to correct them. You can also select the Gray Point Sample tool from the main toolbar.

07 Fine Adjustment

After using a white balance preset or applying a custom white balance, you can fine-tune the results using this slider. This is particularly useful when dealing with images that were shot under mixed lighting.

08 Tint

As well as suffering from blue or orange colour casts, some images may exhibit green or magenta tints caused by fluorescent or other artificial lighting. You can counteract these tints using this slider.