Correct a Color Cast with a Levels Eyedropper

What is a color cast?

A color cast is an overall wash of color caused by the lighting in which a photo was shot. If a color cast makes your photo look unnatural, try correcting it with this quick technique.

A color cast is a tint of a particular color, usually unwanted, which affects the whole, or portion, of a photographic image evenly.

Certain types of light can cause film and digital cameras to have a color cast. Illuminating a subject with light sources of different color temperatures will usually cause color-cast problems in the shadows. In general, the human eye does not notice the unnatural color, because our eyes and brains adjust and compensate for different types of light in ways that cameras cannot.

In the film, color casts can also be caused by problems in development. Improper timing or imbalanced chemical mixtures can cause unwanted casts.

Color casts can also occur in old photographs due to fading of dyes, particularly under the action of ultraviolet light. These may be correctable on a scanned version of the photograph with image editing techniques.

Add a Levels adjustment layer

Go to the Layers panel, click the Create new fill or adjustment layer icon, and choose Levels. This adds a Levels adjustment layer that you can use to make this adjustment without permanently changing the photo.

Choose Levels settings

With the Levels adjustment layer selected in the Layers panel, go to the Properties panel to access controls for this adjustment.

• Click the Gray Eyedropper (the middle Eyedropper icon) in the Properties panel.
• Click on something in the image that should be gray. If there isn’t anything that should be gray, click on something that should be white or black. That color will change to neutral gray and the other colors will shift too.
• If you don’t get a result you like, repeat the previous step somewhere else in the photo.

Save the photo

Save the image in a PSD or TIFF format to retain layers. If you want to change the adjustment at any time, double-click the adjustment icon on the far left of the Levels adjustment layer to reopen the Levels controls in the Properties panel.

Make sure that your images are not saved only in one place (your desktop/laptop computer, for example). Duplicating the content of your hard drive periodically on an external hard drive is something to consider if you don’t have another backup solution yet.

If you’re not a heavy shooter, there are plenty of free online solutions that can be enough for you, like uploading your images to Flickr or Dropbox, or paying a small fee to secure your images on a web photo gallery like SmugMug.