by
MichelB » Mon Jun 01, 2009 11:34 am
Please, just take my editing as an experiment, not a do-it-all correction workflow.
In my understanding, white balance is mainly a problem of the colour temperature of the light source. The temperature slider (blue/yellow) which is the first to use in either ACR or the quick fix PSE dialog is meant to correct for the variation in daylight at different hours in the day, as well as with tungsten of full spectrum light sources. The secondary slider, 'tint' , green/magenta is less important, and can take care of other types of lightings like fluorescent. When you have found a suitable temperature, you may still have to correct the green/magenta slider to get acceptable whites and greys.
Color casts are often the result of reflection of coloured walls or tinted sources of light (stained glass...) and can be of any kind of pure (saturated) colors, here orange. Don Diego said it was the result of an orange curtain. The problem here is that it is difficult to find a way to correct it because the skin hue as well as part of the background are not far from orange. You don't see it clearly because the skin tone is darker. You have to check which other hues are present in the image, and find a way to restore them. Furthermore, orange lighting on relatively dark skin lightens the skin significatively, as would an orange/red filter. So my idea was to darken the skin, and enhance the saturation of magentas and cyans.
If you want to really see the hues or colors independently from luminosity, use Richard Lynch's advice: add a solid color fill of 50% grey in luminosity mode. You'll see that there is not much differences in red/yellows, which means you should enhance and decrease luminosity to get some contrast, and you'll see which hues for which you can tweak saturation.
One feature of hue/sat adjustment layers is that a single layer can have different settings for different hues; it is not the best advice to do so, better use different adjustment layers to document your settings, and foremost, to use different masks for different colors.
Last thing I did with the color layer: to counterbalance any color cast, you can copy to a new layer, and use filter blur average to sample the dominant hue, then invert and set to multiply mode with various opacities. There are many actions on this principle (from Cspringer at atncentral, if I remember well).