How to Correct Mixed Light

Bad lighting conditions are just a fact of photographic life, and among the most vexing is an unwanted mix of light temperatures, like a boardroom with cool blue overhead lights and warm orange late daylight filtering in through the windows.

You may not be able to correct mixed light on the spot, but there is an easy Adobe Lightroom fix that requires just a little digging into the menus. With Color Range masks you can correct all but the thorniest color pollution problems.

I took the photo below to test ambient light for a head shot. There was blue light from a window on the right, and orange incandescent light coming in from the left. To correct mixed light with a few clicks and fewer slider adjustments, follow the steps below.

1. Open the photo you want to correct in Lightroom.

2. Open the Masking Panel by clicking the dotted circle on the right, below the Histogram panel in the Lightroom Classic default set up. A menu for masks should appear.

3. Click Range.

4. Click Color Range.

5. A menu offering color adjustments will open. If you don’t see it, click on the triangle next to the word Color to open it.

6. When you move your cursor over your photo, an eyedropper icon will appear. Hover the eyedropper over the color you would like to change and click. A red overlay will appear everywhere Lightroom sees that color.

7. If the red covers areas you don’t want to correct, use the Refine slider at the top of the control panel to add more or take some away. The mask can be refined even further using the Add or Subtract buttons beneath the mask at the upper right, to basically put another mask on top of your existing mask. Choose whether you want to add more to the mask or take some away, then choose which tool you want to use to apply your choice, such as the Brush or Linear Gradient.

You now have two basic ways to correct the color. One is to use the Temp and Tint sliders, the other is to use the Hue slider.

8. To correct a cyan tint cast on the jacket cast by window light, we have to add the opposite color: orange. (Consult a color wheel to find the color opposite the one you want to correct.) We need to add a combination of yellow from the Temp slider and magenta from the Tint slider.

9. I repeated the process with a new mask to adjust the orange cast on the left of the photo.

You can make more precise selections using options even deeper in the menus, such as Intersects, in which Lightroom isolates specific elements of a photo, such as just a person, then add masks only to that person. But this basic technique works for most problems, even some that Intersects will have a harder time handling.

Roy Furchgott is a fine art portrait photographer in Baltimore, Maryland.