How to Color-Correct a Picture File

Not everyone knows how to color-correct a picture. Here are some basics.

First, you need to memorize the opposing colors. Cyan is the opposite of red, yellow is the opposite of blue, and green is the opposite of magenta. Getting that very straight in your head is the first step.

If you're not very familiar with what those colors look like, go look at them until you recongize them. You need to memorize the three pairs of opposites and what each of the six colors looks like.

Subtracting one of those color has the effect of adding its opposite.

Most modern photo editing programs for digital files make all the above nicely obvious and clear by providing a set of sliders for color correction or color balance. Here's what that looks like in the editor I use:

This is nice, but remember, you need to have these pairs of colors in your head. If they're not in your head, you won't learn to know what a picture needs by looking at the picture.

So here's how you color balance a picture:

1. Look at it.
2. Decide what color it has too much of.
3. Add the opposite.

As with most things relating to photography, you use your visual intelligence to solve problems. That is, you do things by looking. So although the three steps above are "all there is to it," there's more to it, because you need to learn to recognize what it looks like when there's too much of one color in a picture.

The way to calibrate your visual intelligence in this way is to add the wrong colors to your own pictures on purpose.

An example:

Too much blue. Solution: add yellow.

Too much yellow = needs more blue.

Your mind should be telling you "needs magenta" when you see too much green.

A magenta cast is usually easy to see. Add green to correct.

Now here's an interesting aspect of this particular file...

This is 20 points of added red. But there's no overt red in the picture, which brings up why it's important to try this exercise on many different pictures. When there's less of a particular color in the file, it becomes relatively more difficult to see that there's too much of that color when you look at it. It takes a little practice.

Open files, add too much of a color, and then study it, really letting yourself look at the result.

The other reason it's valuable to practice seeing in this way is that it's a good way to learn to see smaller and smaller amounts of color cast. If it's a bit difficult to recognize that the above file is too red when it has 20 points added, imagine how difficult the red cast would be to see when it's only had 5 points added. As you do these exercises, try to start with files that you think are neutral or "perfect" and then add smaller and smaller amounts of color cast, to see if you can detect what that looks like. At what point does it simply become a judgement call? At which point does it cease to really matter? Pay attention.

A tip: as is probably obvious, just as pictures without a certain color make it hard to see a cast, pictures with areas that are supposed to be white can make it easy to see color casts.

When there's no clear neutral to work from, don't forget that looking at small areas can give you good clues as to how overall color can be "off." This is also a good way of evaluating some pictures that might have a lot of light of a particular color.

This picture, for instance, has a lot of blue in it naturally—even the rider's pants are blue and the shadowed building facade is bluish—which make it easy to assume a blue color cast. By looking at the rider's face, the green grass, and the streetlight post, you can get a feel for whether there's really a cast or if that was just the light. Or, add too much yellow and then back off on it until the blues start looking right.

Here's the last picture to round out this set:

Too much cyan. Cyan is fairly close to blue visually (compare this picture to the top one), so it can take a bit of practice to learn to see the difference between cyan and blue casts.

When you've seen the "right" cast, adding the opposite color can seem sort of "magic," a falling-into-place quality, transforming the file into looking "right" effortlessly. Pay attention when that happens, so that you can recognize when it's not happening—if you're struggling with a file, trying different things haphazardly yet still not quite getting it to come 'round, it's a good sign that maybe you haven't seen it properly.

Psychological color
Our eye-brains aren't color agnostic. We're quite sensitive to green, for instance—probably the result of having evolved on a green planet—but to most people, on the other hand, more yellow just reads as richer (sun)light! Cyan and magenta are unnatural colors and look "wrong" to most people, so a little too much can be disturbing, whereas excessive yellow tends to make pictures more pleasing to most viewers. Or at least they're quite tolerant of it. Look at the iPhone picture of Xander from yesterday's "Re Cellphone Cameras" post. It's quite yellow, but still quite tolerable. You can err a lot on the side of too much yellow and not suffer for it. Some automated printers just heap on the yellow like sugar in food. Well, maybe not that bad. But it can be annoying to people who are used to evaluating color.

Here's a nice exercise that I do purely for fun sometimes: when you run across a picture on the web that has obviously, blatantly wrong color, download it and correct it. Yes, small JPEG files downloaded from wherever will not stand as much correction a full RAW files you own, but you might be surprised both by how well it works and by how well you can do. And it's good practice.

Another tip: sometimes when you think you're seeing all kinds of different casts, and it's confusing you, it can simply mean there's "too much" color. Try backing down on the overall saturation, then color correcting, then (if need be) adding saturation back in until you reach the point of sufficiency. The fashion these days is toward oversaturation, which, ironically, can make color correction more difficult.

Interpretation
I recommend that starting to practice color balancing by aiming for a neutral result—it's easiest. And work on pictures that have natural color.

Then, once you've practiced seeing deliberate color casts on your own pictures and have gotten a pretty good eye for it, you can start introducing artistic interpretation into your efforts. I'm sure you've noticed that many files have a fairly narrow range of acceptable interpretations, while others have a wide range of possible colors and hence possible effects. I have a few pictures that I think look best with color that departs from normal or neutral—or from the reality as I remember it. I also have a few files—one sunset picture comes to mind—that have so many valid interpretations it's almost confusing. these can take quite a bit of work before you feel you've really arrived at the optimal result.

When you get a difficult file (and note that a difficult file can be good as a learning opportunity), try working on it for a while and then coming back to it later when you're fresh again. Sometimes, your mind will figure it out in the interim, and the solution will seem relatively easier to find. Starting over with old files of your own work once in a while can be fruitful practice too.

There's obviously much more you can read about color theory, but remember what I said about visual intelligence—the best practice involves looking and evaluating on your own, and doing it again and again, honing your eye's ability to see and your brain's ability to understand rather than merely amassing theoretical knowledge.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Bryan Pollock: "When it comes to colour relationships and you want to have some eyebending fun pick up one of these babies. A great rainy afternoons entertainment. The individual colour cubes come in two pieces and are all jumbled up in the box. You have to sort and assemble each little cube and then arrange them in their proper order in the larger cube. If you think they are easy to assemble think again. The hours I spent staring at two halves of what I thought was the same colour was an eye-opener I can tell you. It really can teach one about subtle colour variations over the whole spectrum. I think there also might be something in the assembly part of the process since one is using ones eye, brain and hands to build the colour relationships."

Mike replies: They used similar tests at the NIMH labs in D.C. when my brother was an intern there—subjects were asked to arrange painted metal disks in color order (very similar to the Pantone Online Color Challenge mentioned in the comments by Paul and John). I did very well on those tests then, and I attributed it to the fact that I was doing a lot of color printing at the time (I do less well on the Pantone test now). And, no joke, I do think your ColorCube would be an excellent exercise for color photographers!

Paddy C: "Nice overview and I would do well to follow your advice and practice more even after all these years. One additional thing I find quite useful is correcting/adjusting an image until you have it 'right' then stepping away. Come back to it in a few hours or the next day and you may find your 'right' was a bit wrong."

Stephen Scharf: "Mike, thanks for the informative post. Always good to refresh how color balance is achieved by understanding the colors and their opposites. Color cast correction is very easily dealt with in Lightroom. The white balance dropper tool makes this incredibly easy to do. The dropper tool zooms in to a pixel by pixel level view and lets you see the balance of red/green/blue so you can get very close to picking an individual pixel that is very close to a target neutral, click, and you're done. I haven't used the color balance sliders in Photoshop since 2006 because of this functionality. Fuji X-cam shooters have an even easier time of this because the auto while balance on Fujis is so good that trying to find a white balance that is more neutral than what the camera finds is pretty difficult."

Mike replies: I would recommend against using the dropper tool method unless you're already very experienced. It's much better for people to learn how to understand color, which will improve color seeing with and without a camera. And the excellent out-of-camera WB of today's cameras—which many photographers simply default to, thus more or less throwing in the towel on interpretive possibilities—is why I said "a difficult file can be good as a learning opportunity." I actually enjoy finding pictures that I can't immediately figure out because I appreciate the challenge.

Hugh Crawford (partial comment): "Yikes! That's very C-print way of working. I can almost smell the blix. I certainly wouldn't use the color balance tool for color balancing. I've sort of forgotten that the color balance tool was there. I always do color balancing with the curves tool if I'm in photoshop, taking advantage of the nice black, gray, and white point tools. You can also grab the red green and blue curves individually to do the same thing as the color balancing tool does with more finesse..." [large snip; see Hugh's full comment in the Comments Section. —Ed.].

Hugh's interpretation of the biker picture

Mike replies: You missed the bit at the very top that said, "Here are some basics."  (Smiley face.)

I like your interpretation of the biker shot much better...except that now it no longer works as an illustration of what I was talking about. (Smiley face redux.)

John Sparks: "Reading your post was like looking at a web page in a foreign language. I totally understand the concept that red and cyan are opposites, but that doesn't help when I look at your examples and the one that is supposed to look too red and the one that is supposed to look too cyan are almost indistinguishable. In fact, I can only easily see two sets of your images, the warm ones (too yellow, green, red and cyan) and the cool ones (too blue and magenta and the motorcycle one). I can see subtle differences between the ones in each group but have no vocabulary for what the differences are. I have still have one of those Kodak viewing filter sets and still wonder why the cyan ones are clear.

"I worked for a year in a photo studio where a large part of my job was making color prints. No amount of trying larger changes made my eyes able to see most of the large differences much less smaller changes (except in the blue and yellow directions where I don't have problems). I could only make final color prints when there was someone else around to tell me what changes I still needed to make. At the end of that year, I could see color better than I ever had before or since, but mostly that just pointed out just how bad my color vision really is.

"I find color balance on the computer much more satisfying than when flailing around in the dark (no pun intended) of a color darkroom. My method of color balances is to take the color temperature slider and move it back and forth until the cool/warm balance looks right to me. Maybe keep it a bit on the warm side as that is generally more appealing.  Some photographs never look right so I just go on to something else.

"My commercial artist wife who can look at a white wall and instantly tell what tint it has looks at my prints and she likes the color so it can't be too bad.

"Maybe I should have stuck with B&W, but, with digital, that brings up the whole toning thing which is even worse than color balancing. At least in the darkroom days, you just picked a paper and chemicals and lived with what you got.

"Your words make it sound like I just need to follow your steps, but it might as well have been written in Mandarin."

Mike replies: It sounds like you might be dealing with a deficit of some sort, in which case it would be desirable to use whatever automatic aids that technology can supply. We all have knacks for certain things and not others. And as far as B&W "toning" is concerned, bear in mind that most people can't even "see" the tone (i.e., color cast) of B&W prints when first faced with the task, unless it's made very obvious. Most non-photographers miss what we consider routine distinctions between "cool tone" and "warm tone" silver papers, for instance.

If others are dealing with similar incomprehension just because they're beginners, keep in mind that the examples here are only illustrations. What you should do is pick some of your own pictures, open them up, and play with the color controls, looking at the effect of adding and subtracting various colors. That's what will help you learn to begin recognizing the subtleties.

Dave in NM: "My first suggestion to anyone looking to have control over color balance in their natural light photos is to start out with a known quantity. Calibrate your monitor with a hardware device and create a profile for your camera (to be applied automatically at import to Lightroom or ACR) using an X-Rite ColorChecker Passport. Then turn off Auto White Balance and shoot with your camera's Daylight setting. Natural light varies greatly in both color and quality—using AWB or an eyedropper tool to achieve a 'neutral' color balance basically discards all those variations and ignores the character that different types of light can bring to a scene. A gray card in early morning is not going to be the same color as a gray card at high noon. The warm light of the 'golden hour' is going to impart an entirely different feeling than the cold green light that precedes a violent summer storm.

"By starting out with a reasonably accurate representation of the scene, rather than the camera or computer's software interpretation of what's correct (neutral grays), you're preserving the unique properties of the light that was present when you tripped the shutter. If you don't like it, you can always adjust it later. But if you don't have an objective example of what was there to begin with, recreating the essential quality of the light as it was will be much more difficult after the fact."

Jack Foley: "I was taught to remember which colors affect which with the phrase 'Red Corvettes BY GM'; that is: Red/Cyan, Blue/Yellow, Green/Magenta. Silly, but helpful."

Comments

[David Dyer-Bennet]

As nearly always, I find it easier to start with the "curves" control (well, an adjustment layer). Moving one of the color curves a little up or down frequently produces a more natural effect than trying to balance shadow, midtone, and highlight adjustments in the "color balance" control (which is also available as an adjustment layer, and I use it that way). Also it's easier to start with a click of the gray dropper to get close, if you can find anything suitable (and I nearly always can, except in landscapes where I merely often can).

[Stan B.]

Praise the lord I stick to B&W. At least half of those looked fine to me...

[Jeff]

An interesting tangent to this subject is the research involving male versus female color perception and ability, including factors such as eye pigment structure, evolutionary roles, etc.

We're apparently not born with equal 'visual intelligence'.

[DavidB]

Your yellow cast actually looks good and warm. The magenta cast one looks exactly like my fist film I used (can't remember) when I was 10. A good lomo image for the net!

[DavidB]

I'm red-green color blind and cannot always tell if there is a color cast problem. I have to ask others to view my images and tell me what they see--and then try to correct it. Very challenging.

Maybe I should be doing black+white.

[Tom Kwas]

Boy, does this bring back memories...I used to print color for a portrait studio when I was in college. Back then, I bought color viewing filters that Kodak used to sell, that you use to look at your work, by viewing through, and you could make some pretty good decisions on which way to go (they told you what to add or subtract)...pretty sure they haven't been available for years!

[Tom Kwas]

Ha, people are still selling them:

http://www.amazon.com/Kodak-Color-Print-Viewing-Filter/dp/0879857919

[Paul]

I had to smile when I read this post. Being magenta/green color blind means your sort of practice is a non-starter for me. Instead I use the La*b* color space to evaluate my images. By separating color and contrast I need only concern myself with two values instead of three. By learning acceptable a*/b* ratios for most non-neutral natural objects I'm able to color correct most images. Nonetheless it will come as no surprise that I much prefer to work in b/w.

[01af]

A straight colour cast affecting all tones equally from dark to bright is the easy case. It will get nasty if the dark tones' cast is different from the the bright tones' cast—in other words, if the colour integrety is infringed. It's comparatively easy to identify the cast in the bright tones but it's difficult for the dark tones.

Read the articles about digital colour on the C F Systems website at http://www.c-f-systems.com/PhotoMathDocs.html (the maker of the ColorPerfect plugin for Photoshop; no affiliation beyond being a happy customer).

[Jim Simmons]

I have found it easier to learn the colours by using the tool within the editor (if your editor has it) that has all six colours in separate sliders in an HSL tool - cyan, magenta, green, blue, red, yellow. I started my learning process by simply pushing each slider to maximum and minimum saturation, and that would show me what if any of that colour was in the file. It especially helps with the subtle distinctions, such as between cyan and blue and the yellows and greens of grass. This approach is less of a mind-bender than the 3-slider use of opposite colours. That is not as straight forward and makes the learning curve steeper.

[Crabby Umbo]

...problem with "white balance", is that there's "correct color" and there's "nice color"...the same reason I bracket, there's the "correct" exposure, and then the one that looks the best...

[Dave]

I learned color correction from "The Canyon Canundrum" by Dan Margulis. Dan makes a great argument that human vision works off opponent colors: yellow vs blue and magenta vs green. You might notice that Photoshop's RAW converter uses those two opponent colors rather than RGB's three. I wrote a tutorial about color correcting using Margulis's method tailored to Photoshop RAW rather than using curves in LAB Colorspace. You can read it here: http://www.photos4u2c.net/2011/01/23/how-to-set-white-balance-in-photoshop/

[hugh crawford]

Yikes!
That's very C-print way of working. I can almost smell the blix. I certainly wouldn't use the color balance tool for color balancing.

I've sort of forgotten that the color balance tool was there. I always do color balancing with the curves tool if I'm in photoshop, taking advantage of the nice black, gray, and white point tools. You can also grab the red green and blue curves individually to do the same thing as the color balancing tool does with more finesse (IE you can really muck things up that way) which is good if you are color correcting copies of faded color prints (smelling that blix again).

In the splash photo I'd take the gray point from the brightest part of the splash since it represents a diffusion of all the light sources. If I knew that the house was white, I'd use that as a gray reference then bump the blue up a little because it's in the shade, and maybe the green down a bit because of so much green reflecting on it. My guess is that the mud in the water is reddish clay. Maybe not Oklahoma red but redder than California Central Valley mud which runs to blue-greenish gray. Oh, and the chromatic aberration makes it really hard to see whether the color is right or not.

The bike photo looks like it was taken just before sunset with really warm sidelight from the low Sun and sort of bluish skylight, so you are torn between realistic representation of the actual scene and light which is very orange, or the objects in the scene as your mind corrects them.

My experience is that the power transformer, and probably the building are predominantly neutral in color. The galvanized signpost is a cold gray most likely. I know the KIA logo is white and red. The concrete is probably kind of reddish is it is geographically close to that other photo. Since there is this big known white surface facing the camera and you know the photo is taken in the "golden hour" I'd take the gray point from the building wall.

Actually I usually do this sort of thing in Lightroom, which is completely different workflow.

One other thing, in Photoshop the fade tool (under edit) is your friend, sadly missing from lightroom as is a straightforward black point and white point tool, and really you should be doing this in layers which is way beyond the scope of a comment, even this one.

One other thing about the color balancer tool, it seems to be prone to producing images that have a color cast on one screen or printer that is different on another screen, even in a color managed environment.

As an learning exercise it might be useful, as were the Kodak color print viewing filter kits, but I never got clean results using them either, mainly because my brain would adjust to the color change too readily.
For that sort of thing, the Variations tool ( Image > Adjustments > Variations ) is way more useful, not that I ever use it except over the phone.

[Chuck Albertson]

This is why I bought a Monochrom for my first electric camera.

But when I shoot digital color, I've been getting better about using one of those X-Rite Passport thingamajigs to correct color. You can set it up as a pre-set in Lightroom and apply it to all the other pictures you shot under the same lighting conditions and get pretty decent results, with half the aggro of adjusting each picture separately.

[John Howell]

...or if you want the electronic instant-gratification version of the ColourCube try http://www.blendoku.com - horribly addictive!

[Ctein]

Dear Richard,

Yeah, but the saturation's terrible. I can run the saturation slider all the way to max and I still see hardly any color in a Tri X scan.

Maybe it's just a bad batch of film. What do you think?

pax / Ctein

[Earl Dunbar]

I had the good fortune to work at a professional colour lab as a printer for a few years. Our QA manager, a wonderfully kind and helpful woman, could call colour as well as anyone. Literally -- when she once went to "Pako School", (raise your hand if you remember Pako) she commented to the instructor that she could recognize as little as a one-half point correction. Which the the instructor didn't believe. But the denistometer proved her right.

I'm not sure I ever got that accurate, but I was usually within a point, and could colour correct my own work.

Whatever the software tools one chooses to accomplish correction, understanding the fundamentals and actually seeing colour is fundamental.

So thank you, and goodnight, Barb Arnold ... wherever you are.

[JG]

Well, if you want a basic approach, this one is easy and works fairly well more often than not: http://www.markushartel.com/blog/learn-from-markus/easy-neutral-colors

[Boy, I wish more people knew about that. Gets rid of that horrible brownish-yellowishness of so many fluorescents-on-concrete and night shots. --Mike]

[Tim]

Once you've neutralized the colours, slide the tint toward magenta and temperature about 1.5x as far warm and pretend you shot it on Velvia...

[Colin Work]

I find the longer I stare at a picture, the harder it is to see the required correction (I guess the eye is compensating). When this happens I use the Photoshop auto color tool. This seldom produces the right result, but it can point you in the right direction and also helps reset your eye. Simple undo the auto correct and have another try at color balance.

[John Boeckeler]

If I want to see with a yellow cast, I shut my right eye and if I want to see neutral colors, I shut my left eye. That's because I had the cataract removed from my right eye a few months ago; cataracts have a yellow tinge. There's a distinct and strong difference, very noticeable when I look at my old paintings, but not so much with my photographs.

Unless I've screwed up the WB in my camera settings, the color's usually very good in Lightroom "as shot". For me, the "auto" in Lightroom is usually just a little on the warm side. Those two settings take care of 90% of my color adjustments. When they don't, the sliders do. The Spyder takes care of the monitor color balance.

It's just so easy to get good color now, such an improvement over developing color negative film, using those roller tubes for printing and the Kodak filters for judging corrections. I laugh when I look back.

[philip_pj]

'probably the result of having evolved on a green planet'

As alluded to by the marvellous Lorne Malvo (BB Thornton) in Fargo, it's because our ancestors needed to distinguish tones of green to identify and avoid predators.

Colour is the core PP skill. PS does it best (Hue Sat and esp. Sel Col, I use Joe's chroma spaces too), but LR/ACR are not bad. A common mistake is to remove nature entirely, often blue/cyan casts, then again I am a documentarian so rather biased to reality.

The key is to understand and see all other colours in each colour, and know how to adjust them optimally. I always start with fine-tuning WB on a 'neutral' file which accounts for so many colour issues, then work on keeping contrast low enough to not interfere with colour tones. Exposure > End points > tone distribution > WB > colour balance > micro-contrast (e.g. clarity) > finetune in PS, as psds often look different. Eye droppers are good as a guide only, IMO.

[John Boeckeler]

Mike, you may be interested in the fundamental question of how well you see color before you get to the issue of correcting the colors you see. There's a very good online test for that purpose at http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge.

I've taken the test a number of times over the years with occasional wild scores that got much better when I corrected my monitor with the Spyder.

[Paul]

There's a really fun little challenge here to see how well you can perceive and sort the hues in various gradients: http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge. (Obviously having a good and well-calibrated monitor will make it easier).

[Geof Margo]

I am showing my ignorance, but I don't find an equivalent window with the 3 paired sliders (cyan-red, magenta-green, yellow-blue) in Lightroom. What am I missing?
Geof

[D. Hufford.]

Yes, and as mentioned there is room for interpretation. Most of the film simulation software such as DxO Filmpack introduce color casts to imitate various films color casts. I had never really noticed it much when I actually used film, but it is easy to see now. Since I have probably already committed an unforgivable photo forum sin by using such software, I often double the sin and leave it alone unless excessive.

[John Sparks]

Maybe I was too obscure with my analogy to a foreign language. I'm colorblind (strong protanomaly). I'm not a beginner, I have a strong background in color printing and digital technology. I know what I need to do, I just physically can't see what other people see.

[richardplondon]

Geof Margo: you will see this differently for a raw image or a non-raw image, but effectively, the White Balance temperature control slides the picture along a blue/amber axis, and the tint control along a green/magenta axis. So with a raw image you would depart from the standard white-balance "recipes" such as Daylight, or As Shot, and make a Custom WB for this particular picture. For a camera JPG, these are merely overlaid corrections, just
as the Colour Balance tool would be in Photoshop.

Assuming the colour rendition is generally OK, and you are just addressing a particular issue in a given photo, the WB is usually all you need to concentrate on. But for special pictorial effects or to rectify a calibration issue, there are lots of other ways to affect hue, and these work rather differently from each other.

Lightroom has per-channel saturation and hue-shift options in the Camera Calibration panel, though these are not really intended for picture-by-picture usage I think. Also the Tone Curve panel can be set to separate out the Red Green and Blue similar to Photoshop "curves". And specific parts of the hue spectrum can be tweaked more selectively, using the HSL panel. And choosing different camera calibration profiles (for raw) will alter the basic colour character onto which these adjustments are overlaid.

[Joe Holmes]

Yes, what Hugh Crawford said. As long as your monitor is calibrated, and you take break to give your eyes a chance to see the image fresh, and you look at some proof prints as a final test for important images, it's all to taste. I often click around with the gray Curves tool until I find what I like -- I prefer a warmish image.

But I also believe in shortcuts because life is short, and here's one that works when I find a challenging image: In Photoshop, open Image -> Adjustments -> Match Color and check the Neutralize check box. Voila. It's like some sort of weird miracle. If that doesn't work, you can't tweak it, you have to start over, but a lot of times, it's spot on. Unfortunately it doesn't work as an adjustment layer, so there's no going back. You Photoshop purists will want to use it on a copy of your background layer.

[Greg Harris]

Nice post and comments.
A classic book on color theory from the art world is Josef Albers' 1963 classic "Interaction of Color". It was an early "interactive" book on color theory and It's been republished in book form, interactive book (pricey) and, my favorite, an affordable interactive iPad version http://yupnet.org/interactionofcolor/

[jim]

Ctein,
If you will use color filters with your Tri-x, they make red, green, and yellow that I am aware of you may have some chance of adding to that color on your Tri-x. And thanks to Mikes excellent explanation you now know what color using each will produce. I would lend you mine but they are all 52mm, a size lenses are no longer made in.
Good Luck,
Jim

[darr]

Got this on my first try! Not bad for just having my 56th birthday.

[Gordon]

It took me a mere 5 years to understand the importance of setting the white point in Lightroom. When I did I also found that I could identify the blue/yellow and/or green/magenta movement required to neutralize any cast I was seeing - and to see the cast itself. I've learned to use the gradient and brush tools to adjust localized cast in shadows. Often the color under a roof overhang, for instance, is much cooler than the sunlit portion of a building so using these tools offers the chance to even the tone if I wish.

[Stephen Cowdery]

The color balance sliders work well, their strength is in their repeatability. Curves are much more complex; although you can do more with them you can make more mistakes as well.

Don't forget to use the shadows and highlights button as well. Very good for consistent sepia tones from desaturated files (Red shadows +20, Red Middle +10, Blue Highlights -20), make it into an action and it's the same every time.

[Dillan]

Like DaveB above, I am red-green colour blind. It makes all of this an awkward subject. I'd stick to black and white, except that I do like colour. I live in a colour world, and the colours I see are no less fascinating to me than to a person who sees colour more accurately. And so, I muddle through.