Changing the Underlying Tone of the Photo - Color Balance Again
In Case 2 I showed the use of the Color Balance command in Picture Window to remove an unwanted color tone in an old color photo. In this case, I have an image which is not representative of the tone of the original photo. The print is an albumen print, and the color is typical for the technique. This time, however, I have an advantage. I have a version from the scanner that is the appropriate tone. I'm going to use the color balance command to remove the wrong color, and then to add in the correct color as sampled from the photo with the correct tone. Below is a screen shot of the color balance command in Picture Window.
This is a busy screen, but let me go through the elements. The image in the top center is the one we are working on (from the prior page, the copy stand image using manual white balance). The image to the top right is the scanned image, which I am only using for its color. Note this does not have to be the same image, it just has to have the right color for us to sample. In this screen, I have sampled from the sky of the top center image for the remove highlight cast box (the color picker box to the left of the screen). You can see in the remove box in the color balance dialog box this brownish color. The bottom right image shows a preview of what the image will look like with the color removed - note that it is much closer to a monochrome image than the original now that some of the brownish color cast has been removed. We're halfway there. The next step is to add in the new color cast, as seen in the screen shot below.
We're still working on the same color balance command, only now I have opened the Add Highlight Cast color picker box (by clicking on the Add box in the color balance dialog box). I have again clicked on the sample icon, and I have sampled the color from the sky on the image that has the color I want. The preview shows that I have the proper color cast. So, I simply sampled the original to remove the color I didn't want, and then sampled another image that happened to have the color I did want. You can, of course, do this manually, but if you already have an image that has the proper color cast, why not just borrow that?
So the original image:
Is now recolored as below.
Easy, isn't it? It is my understanding that Adobe Photoshop, and some of Photoshop's competitors can do the same thing just as easily.