How to Correct White Balance in Adobe Photoshop CC (2021)

White balance is one of the most important things to get right in a photo. When the white balance is off, the entire image takes on a color cast. Skin tones look unnatural, whites appear yellow or blue, and the overall mood of the image feels wrong. Ideally you set white balance correctly in camera, but that does not always happen. Luckily, Photoshop has a reliable way to fix it after the fact.

The technique uses a guide layer to find the true neutral gray point in your image, then uses the Curves eyedropper to set the white balance based on that reference. Let’s walk through it.

How to Correct White Balance in Photoshop

Step 1: Create a Guide Layer

1. Open your image in Photoshop.
2. In the Layers panel, click the lock icon on your image layer to unlock it from being a background layer.
3. Click the Create New Layer button (the plus icon at the bottom of the Layers panel) to add a new empty layer.
4. With the new layer selected, go to Edit > Fill. Set Contents to 50% Gray and Opacity to 100%. Click OK. The layer fills with a perfectly neutral gray.
5. Make sure this gray layer is still selected. Go to the Blending Mode dropdown at the top of the Layers panel and change it to Difference. The image will now look strange with inverted colors. This is expected.

Step 2: Find the Neutral Point

6. With the gray layer still selected, go to the adjustments at the bottom of the Layers panel (the half-circle icon) and apply a Threshold adjustment.
7. In the Threshold dialog, drag the slider down toward the left until you see small black areas appear on an otherwise white image. These black areas represent the points in your photo that are closest to true neutral gray.
8. Select the Eyedropper Tool from the toolbar. Hover over one of the black areas.
9. Hold Shift and click on a black area. This places a color sample point marker on that exact spot for reference.

Step 3: Correct the White Balance

10. Now hide (or delete) the Threshold adjustment layer and the 50% gray layer. You should see your original image again, with the sample point marker still visible.
11. Select your original image layer. Go to the adjustments and apply a Curves adjustment.
12. In the Curves dialog, find the three eyedroppers on the left side. Click the middle eyedropper (the gray point eyedropper).
13. Click on the color sample point you placed earlier. Photoshop will adjust the entire image’s white balance based on that neutral reference point.

The image should now have corrected, natural-looking colors. The gray point you identified tells Photoshop what “neutral” should look like, and it shifts all the other colors to match.

Tips

• The technique works best when your image actually contains neutral gray. Concrete, asphalt, white clothing in shadow, and gray objects are all good candidates.
• Try multiple sample points. If the first correction does not look right, undo it, place a different sample point on another black area, and try again. Different neutral points can give slightly different results.
• For RAW files, correct white balance in Camera Raw or Lightroom before opening in Photoshop. These tools have more precise white balance controls designed specifically for this purpose.
• Compare before and after. Toggle the Curves adjustment layer on and off to see the difference. Sometimes the correction is dramatic, other times it is subtle.

That is how you correct white balance in Photoshop. It uses a bit of color theory behind the scenes, but the process itself is straightforward once you know the steps.