Introduction to Photoshop CS2/CS3

The first lesson provided an introduction to Photoshop by discussing some of the aspects of Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw software. The instructor (Ron Lacey) recommended we practice using Adobe Bridge for photo management and ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) to discover how to apply White Balance corrections to our photos. Ron also recommended we take pictures in the cameras RAW mode using different settings for White Balance to force a mismatch between the actual lighting conditions and the cameras settings. I took many shots using CRW (Canon's Raw format), with several mismatched conditions thrown into the mix.

Photo 1

The first photo was taken of a car with the camera (Canon G7) set to Auto White Balance. I did not make any adjustments to the settings in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), and the picture looked like the following.

car auto WB

Then I reset the camera's White Balance to a mismatched Tungsten. The shot looked like this.

tungsten WB

After resetting the Temperature drop down menu in ACR to Daylight, the photo changed its look.

tung reset to Daylight WB

Then I tried a mismatch in the White Balance by setting it to Fluorscent.

fluorescent WB

I opened the RAW image in ACR and reset the White Balance through the drop down menu to Daylight. The photo changed to the normal colors.

fluorescent reset to Daylight WB

Photo 2

I also shot a truck (I just liked the excuse to shoot things of my choice, and this was fun). This is with Auto WB (White Balance).

truck auto WB

Then I changed the White Balance to Fluorescent. The photo changed as we would expect.

truck fluorescent WB

I reset the WB through the drop down menu in ACR, by changing to Cloudy WB. The result was nearly the same as the Auto WB photo, but just a little bit warmer. I could have moved the Temperature slider to decrease the shot to exactly the temperature measured on the Auto WB picture but I decided not to do that. I found it interesting that the drop down WB selections could not always exactly recapture the original Auto WB image.

truck fluorescent reset Cloudy WB

Conclusions

The most interesting thing to me was that the camera seemed to reset the White Balance in the Auto mode to different temperatures depending on the subject being shot. So while it was a fairly bright but overcast day, any attempt I made to correct an intentionally mismatched White Balance did not always work as I thought it would. In some cases, such as with the car, I gained the best match to the initial Auto WB shot by resetting the drop down menus on the Tungsten and Fluorescent WB photos to a Daylight setting. On the other hand, I regained a more correct picture of the truck (with the Auto WB photo taken the same day at nearly the same time as the photo of the car) by changing the Fluorescent WB picture to Cloudy WB in the ACR's drop down menu. I assumed that was because the Auto setting on the camera allowed the White Balance to drift to a temperature that the camera found "best" for each individual shot. All in all, an interesting lesson.

Footnote

Each of the images shown above was created by 1) accepting whatever the photo looked like in ACR (with respect to the White Balance settings or adjustments I made to the drop down WB menu) and opening the picture into Photoshop CS3, 2) making a Save for Web and resizing the image to 600 pixels width with the saving made in JPEG High Quality mode. I chose to ignore any clipping that I saw in the ACR window in order to create a more equal baseline for comparing the changes of the White Balance settings.