Photoshop Tutorials: Neutralizing Color Casts With The Photo Filter

Step 3: Invert The Color In The Color Picker

In order to neutralize the color cast, we're going to invert the problem color that we just sampled, which will give us the exact opposite color. We can then use the Photo Filter to combine the inverted (opposite) color with the problem color, which will effectively cancel out the color cast. In order to do that, we first need to invert the color, and the easiest way to do that inside the Color Picker is with the Lab color options, circled in red below:

Ignore the "L" option, which stands for "Lightness", since we're not interested in changing any lightness values. All we want to do is change the color, which is controlled by both the a and b options. As we can see in the Color Picker above, the orange color I sampled from my image is made from an "a" value of 26 and a "b" value of 79. Your numbers will most likely be different. To invert the color, all I need to do is add a negative ("-") sign in front of both numbers, like so:

If you already had a negative sign in your "a" or "b" values, simply remove it. So add a negative sign if there isn't one, and remove it if there is one to invert the color. We can see in the Color Picker above that my color has now changed to more of a blue color, and that is the opposite of the orange color I sampled. I can now use this color to neutralize my color cast.

Click OK when you're done to exit out of the Color Picker.

Step 4: Drag The Density Slider To Remove The Color Cast

Back in the Photo Filter dialog box, I can see that the color swatch is now showing my inverted color. All I need to do at this point to remove the color cast is drag the Density slider to the right, which will determine how much of my inverted color is being blended into the image, until my image looks better. In my case, I don't want to remove the orange completely because I think it adds a bit of warmth to the image, so I'll leave just a hint of it in. I think a Density value of around 74% works best here:

Here's my image at this point: