so there is no white balance tool after it’s opened into the photoshop cs4 interface?
White balance is something you set in camera or apply to a RAW file. Camera RAW is the RAW interface of Photoshop.
You can do all sorts of color balancing in Photoshop, if thats what you are asking for, but none of them can replicate the effect of setting WB on a RAW file.
it would be nice if there is a similar white balance tool that allows you to click on a neutral area to set the white balance of an image not opened from camera raw
You can set a neutral gray via the gray color picker in Levels or Curves.
(Thats great for removing a color cast, but not quite the same as setting white balance in a RAW file).
Just out of interest, raw is not an acronym, it is a simple English word and should be written "raw".
John,
That may be. I choose to write it in capital letters to distinguish it from raw as in ‘that’s raw’ or ‘raw fish’. Like I normally write TIFF or JPG instead of tiff and jpg.
Fair enough. The difference to me is that JPEG is short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and TIFF for Tagged Image File Format. A raw image contains raw (unprocessed) data.
No big deal though.:)
You are right, but I am stubborn.
White balance in Photoshop: Levels, Curves, Color Balance, AutoLevels, AutoColor, etc.
WB is a bit of misnomer… what your fiddling with is temperature. And it’s not always in balance or using white (what is white in higher dynamic range images anyway?).
To be honest I find the wb approach a bit cludgy in PS and far prefer to look at it in ACR if I can.
Curves in LAB has th best response for me to correct colour casts… the colour balance tool in RGB is really doesn’t live up to its name…as per the photo filters that dont. As ACR shows, you cant just slap orange over an image and say its warmer.
Image > Adjustments > Photo Filter might be an answer.
CS3 has this,not sure about CS4.
is it possible to take an image that is currently open in the photoshop interface and temporarily move it to the camera raw interface to do white balance, etc. and then bring it back into the photoshop interface?
No.
but you can save it as a tiff and open that in ACR
is there any technical reason that the white balance tool is only available for raw? or is it that adobe hasn’t gotten around to adding one for the main photoshop interface?
Because Photoshop already has a few dozen ways to achieve white balance. ACR just puts a different UI on top, and can be more accurate for data that started as raw sensor values.
