Page 89 - World of Animals - Issue #41

Wildlife photography

Tip 4
Avoid blue hues

Keep your colours accurate by
taking control of your white balance

Even with the best of kit, snow can often
appear blue if your camera fails to set the
correct white balance. An easy fix for this

problem is to use the Shade white balance
preset, which will warm the shot up. If
your camera is able to shoot Raw, do so,
and you’ll be able to make much more
accurate tweaks to the colours in the editing Auto white balance Corrected in Raw Overcorrected white balance
stage. See our editing tips below for more In Auto White balance your camera may Play with your white balance presets, Watch you don’t overcorrect the blue hue
information on this technique. fail to get the colours right, resulting in or correct in Raw, in order to get more or use the wrong preset, as you’ll get an
orangey tone instead.
accurate colours.
blue snow.
Tip 5
Enhance Difficult lighting

with editing If your image was shot
in mixed light, with
some areas of direct
Tweak your shots to sun and some areas of
correct colours and tones shade, you may want
to use a layer mask to
In this section we will show you change the colour in
how to adjust images using Adobe select areas only.
Camera Raw for Raw files, or

Photoshop for JPEGs, but you
can also achieve similar results
by using other software, such as
Elements, Lightroom, or the free
software GIMP.
To banish colour casts from
your snow, tweak your white
balance in Adobe Camera Raw by
selecting the Shade preset, then
use the White Balance tool to click
on an area that should be white, or
manually tweak the Temperature
slider to get the warmth you
require. If you haven’t shot in Raw,
open a JPEG in Photoshop, head
to the Color Balance tool and add

a small amount of yellow and red Original file
to counteract the blue hue.
If your snowy shots look a

little flat, increase the Blacks
slider a touch in Adobe Camera
Raw, and add a touch more
contrast. You may also want
to increase the Exposure if the
snow still looks a little grey, as
well as make colours pop with a
Saturation boost. Or alternatively,
in Photoshop simply head to
Image>Adjustments>Brightness/
Contrast and increase the sliders
a touch until you get the desired
effect, and head to Hue/Saturation
if the colours need a boost.

The extra contrast and
colour correction applied If your images have a blue hue or flat tones, some

here has massively
improved this image small tweaks are all that’s needed @ Thinkstock

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