Manual Color Balance - Corel Paint Shop Pro Tutorial

Vikki Olds 1 The Manual Color Balance tool in Paint Shop Pro is a very powerful tool. It allows you to select a whole image or just certain pixels for color correction. In the image below I have chosen to alter whole images. You can get to the Manual Color Balance tool from the Effects menu. Effects>Enhance Photo>Manual Color Correction. 2 The image above is the original image. It looks a little on the green side to me. Because I want the water to be the focus I want to concentrate on that. Below is the altered image. 3 The Manual Color Balance tool has many pre-built options for color correction and you can use one of those as I did or you can create a custom color and add it to the User Colors. For this image I chose the Water option. I turned off Preserve Saturation because I have not adjusted the saturation yet. I want to preserve the lightness because I like where it's at so I chose to leave that. If I had corrected both lightness and saturation before using Manual Color Balance I would have checked both boxes. You can choose to correct only certain portions of an image by checking the Freehand selection option and then drag a selection rectangle over the area you want to correct. 4 As with most filters in the Enhance Photo tools, you don't have to use them only on photos. Below is the original image. 5 Below shows what happens if you leave preserve saturation off. I had previously adjusted the saturation. Although this is a neat effect, it is not what I had in mind. 6 Below is the image with Preserve Saturation off. 7 Since I want to preserve the image saturation I check the Preserve Saturation check box. 8 The resulting image below is much more to my liking. 9 Remember, if you are using Manual Color Balance and you have already adjusted lightness and saturation, keep those options checked when you do your color correction. Unless of course, you are looking for a different kind of effect. Also, remember that you are not limited to the pre-built color choices. You can click on the custom color box and choose any color you'd like and then save it for later use.     Copyright 2002, Vikki Olds, All Rights Reserved