You shot an entire session under tungsten light with your camera set to daylight white balance. Everything looks like it was photographed inside a toaster. Don’t panic. Photoshop can fix this, and if you shot RAW, it’s trivially easy.

The RAW Advantage

If you shot in RAW format, white balance correction is lossless. RAW files store the raw sensor data without baking in any color temperature, so you can change it after the fact with zero quality loss.

Open your RAW file in Camera Raw (it opens automatically) and look at the White Balance section. You have two sliders:

Temperature — Slide left for cooler (blue) or right for warmer (yellow). This corrects the most common white balance errors.

Tint — Slide left for green or right for magenta. This fine-tunes to correct fluorescent lighting or mixed light sources.

The fastest method: click the White Balance Eyedropper tool, then click on something in the image that should be neutral gray or white. Camera Raw recalculates the entire color balance from that reference point. A white shirt, a gray card, a white wall — any neutral tone works.

If the eyedropper doesn’t nail it perfectly, fine-tune with the sliders. The preview updates in real-time, so trust your eyes.

Fixing White Balance in JPEG

JPEGs are harder because the white balance is baked into the pixel data. You can’t truly change the color temperature — you’re shifting colors after the fact. But you can get close enough that nobody will notice.

Method 1: Camera Raw Filter

Even for JPEGs, you can access Camera Raw’s white balance tools.

  1. Convert your layer to a Smart Object (right-click > Convert to Smart Object)
  2. Go to Filter > Camera Raw Filter
  3. Use the same Temperature and Tint sliders as with RAW files
  4. Because it’s a Smart Filter, you can readjust later

This is my preferred method for JPEG white balance correction because the Camera Raw interface is intuitive and the results are good.

Method 2: Curves Adjustment

For more precise control, use Curves. Add a Curves adjustment layer and work in individual channels.

  1. Select the Blue channel from the dropdown
  2. Raise the curve midpoint to add blue (fixes warm/orange cast)
  3. Lower the curve midpoint to remove blue (fixes cool/blue cast)
  4. Switch to the Red and Green channels for further refinement

This method gives you more control over specific tonal ranges. You might want to correct the shadows differently than the highlights, which curves allows.

Method 3: Photo Filter

The simplest approach. Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Photo Filter.

Choose a warming or cooling filter and adjust the density. Warming Filter (85) adds orange/amber tones. Cooling Filter (80) adds blue tones. It’s not as precise as the other methods, but it’s fast and intuitive.

Mixed Lighting Situations

The real challenge is mixed lighting — tungsten lamps on one side of the room, daylight from a window on the other. No single white balance setting works for the whole image.

The solution is selective correction:

  1. Correct the overall image for the dominant light source
  2. Add a Curves or Photo Filter adjustment layer
  3. Correct the secondary light source on that layer
  4. Use the layer mask to limit the correction to only the areas lit by that secondary source

Paint white on the mask where you need the secondary correction. Paint black where you don’t. This lets you have different white balance corrections in different parts of the same image.

Prevention Is Easier Than Correction

Auto white balance on modern cameras is surprisingly good. But for critical work, shoot a gray card at the start of each lighting setup. In Camera Raw, click the eyedropper on the gray card image, copy the Temperature and Tint values, and paste them across all images from that setup. Perfect white balance, every time, across the entire batch.

Even without a gray card, shooting RAW gives you so much flexibility that white balance errors are genuinely a non-issue. It’s one more reason to never shoot JPEG for anything you care about.