Photo Editing Technique - True Neutral Lighting and Getting the Most Detail

Several times I have fallen victim to leaving my camera on the wrong color setting and having the resulting picture look off-color as a result. This will be a tutorial on how to correct color in Picasa 3 and also how to manually adjust the contrast to get the most satisfying and realistic color and light balance.

Here is a photo of a snowy landscape I took in the early morning. The camera white balance was set for indoor lighting, which caused this natural light to appear blue:

Notice the histogram in the bottom-right corner; the blue, yellow and red are occupying different areas, which means there is very little true white in the picture. Especially odd in a picture so full of snow and clouds.

To fix this, click on the eye-dropper button under the label Neutral Color Picker, then click on a spot in your picture that you know should look pure white, or pure gray. I've provided suggestions off the tips of the two arrows. 

If you have picked a good white spot, your picture will look much closer to true white as in the following:

Notice the Histogram now shows the colors overlapping much more. This shows the histogram agreeing with the obvious: I've made the picture more "neutral" gray.

Still, the picture seems too dim and hazy as compared with my sensation of it with my own eyesight. So, I'd like to see it a bit lighter, clearer and perhaps a touch bluer, as the morning light often is.

I'll begin by trying to make the most of the brightness range, shown in the histogram by how well the pixels fill the total width of the histogram. At present, my pixels are bunched pretty tightly in the middle of the histogram, which means most of my picture is just medium brightness. For a picture that is more satisfying to look at, you will have some pixels near the bright end and some near the dark end of the histogram. To accomplish this, we'll use Picasa's Highlights and Shadows sliders. 

Move the sliders to try to get the pixels to fill the empty areas on the right and left sides of the histogram, but be careful not to lose too many pixels off the edge, or you will cause pure black or pure white, which is equivalent to losing detail in your photograph. 

Here you can see how much I used the sliders and what it did to the picture and the histogram.

You could stop there and have a pretty realistic representation of the light conditions. 

I am going to take it one more step though, and see if I can bring some of the blue morning light back. To do this, I'm just going to slightly add to the color saturation.

By increasing the saturation just a bit, you bring out some of the color that was actually recorded and just make it more prominent in the photograph. The arrow is pointing out that the white in the foreground is still white, unlike the original, which had the entire photo tinted blue.

This strikes me as fairly realistically conveying what the morning air looked like to my eye. 

Perhaps I've added too much blue because of a weakness for hypersaturation. 

But since the viewer can't be there to smell the cold crisp morning air, she might forgive me for trying a little too hard to make the image look crisp and cool.