Colour Balance adjustments can be carried out directly on the image or using an adjustment layer. You’re presented with three sliders – Cyan/Red, Magenta/Green and Yellow/Blue. Note that these are pairs of complementary colours. In our sample shot, our subject’s skin tones have a magenta tinge, so we’d counteract that by moving the Magenta/Green slider to the right, which will shift the image’s colour balance towards green and away from magenta. You need to develop a good eye for colour casts to use the Colour Balance dialog effectively. For example, fi xing our original shot effectively meant spotting that the unwanted tinge was magenta rather than red (which is what it looks like at fi rst glance).

For a more extreme effect, we can increase the Red/ Cyan to 100 and reduce the Yellow/Blue to -100. This gives the warm colours you’d expect from candlelight or fi relight.