Photoshop Tutorial: Secret White Balance Trick by Graphics Geeks

In this quick tutorial, Graphics Geeks will show you a secret way to fix your white balance in Photoshop.

Usually people just create a curves adjustment layer, and then use the pipettes to select the black and white points. In theory, Photoshop should then automatically configure the curves adjustment to fix your white balance.

As you can see though, in practice, this often doesn't work out very well. These extreme sampling points have poor color accuracy and only allow for very linear adjustments.

A much better alternative would be to carry out our sampling in the mid tones. This would allow us to generate more accurate curved adjustments and take advantage of the better color accuracy.

We call this the grey point. And here's my secret to finding it - even if you didn't include a fifty percent grey card in your image!

First create a new layer and fill it with grey by going to Edit...Fill...50% Grey. Then set the blending mode for this layer to Difference.

Next create a Threshold adjustment layer at the top of the layer stack. And drag the slider almost all of the way to the left. You'll see just a few areas will be highlighted in black now. These are the areas of your image closest to fifty percent grey.

Now select the Color Sampler tool and click the center of one of those blackened areas, to save a sampler point. It's best to choose a point that you remember was grey, and was also directly lit by your light source.


Once you're done hide the grey and threshold layers and select your curves adjustment layer. This time, instead of using the black and white point pipettes, we're going to use the grey point pipette instead. That's the one in the middle. Use this pipette on the exact sampler point we saved earlier.


You'll see that, in this case, our curves adjustment has worked amazingly well. This is because it has automatically created some really accurate curved adjustments to fix our white balance.


Finally, let's not forget to remove our color sampler point. To do this, go back to the Color Sampler tool and click Clear on the top bar.