If you are interested in photography you will know that raw pictures do not always produce the desired results. Sometimes you need a little editing to make the photo more natural. It might seem contradictory but sometimes cameras have too much of this or too much of that which messes up the colour balance of the pictures and distorts the so called temperature. However, most photo processing applications of today have easy and automatic solutions for this.
One of those applications is Google’s Picasa. Although most people use it as a simple photo organizer, it is much more than that. The lightweight application also offers quite a few editing options and amongst them is a colour correction feature that pretty much anyone can use.
To start with, open a picture inside the application. The photo should appear in the right side of the screen while an editing window appears in the left. The first window is the “Commonly needed fixes” one. There you will find a lot of automated options that can automatically fix a lot of things in your cpictures like red eyes, contrast and simple colour correction. However, they might not always produce good results. What you want to do for the white balance is go to the next tab. Of course you can try some of these options first and see if they suit you.
When you are in the next tab you will see an option called “Neutral Color Picker”. Click on the color picker and choose a part of your image with a very neutral color like grey or white. You can click on a white shirt for example or in a cloud. This will automatically correct the white balance in the picture with amazing results. You can also click on the wand icon but it will not produce as good result as ding it manually. If something is not to your liking you can also use the sliders but they are quite hard to get right.
