Color correction

Balance neutrals, and achieve consistent color with light source profiles

Photo Ninja includes simple, effective controls for setting the white balance in an image (that is, removing color casts). It also utilizes light source profiles to improve the overall accuracy of colors.

Built-in daylight profiles are available for a large number of cameras. These will usually yield good results for natural or tungsten lighting. For more accuracy or to accomodate additional kinds of lighting, you can photograph a ColorChecker reference target under a particular illuminant and then use Photo Ninja's profiling facility to quickly create a custom light source profile. Creating a custom profile is easy, and Photo Ninja supports creating profiles for individual shooting sessions.

Example 1

Left: Shot under fluorescent lighting, but corrected with a daylight profile. The red patch is too orange, and blue patches have shifted toward purple. Right: Same image corrected using a fluorescent profile created from the same image. In both cases, note that neutrals are clean, showing that white balancing alone is insufficient for accurate color under this kind of lighting.

   

Example 2

Theater lighting corrected using the white-balance eyedropper, with a sample from the white makeup on the girl's face.

Example 3

In the left image, the camera's white balance setting results in vibrant sky, water, and foliage colors, but Mount Moran looks a little cool. In the right image, a simple adjustment of the color temperature slider was sufficient to warm the mountain. The blues and greens were pulled back to their original values using the hue affinity control in the color enhancement filter.