Free PS Elements: Project St Imre Part IV (removing the color veil) in Elements

1.Load the photo
Now where were we? Around here. We removed an unwanted picture element and the annoying chromatic aberration, plus brought back the details of the burnt-out areas of the pedestal. Now it looks like we have another job, this time with colors, since the photo is a bit blueish, feeling cold, while it should indeed reflect the warmth of summer sunshine.

2. Color variations
If you are familiar with our Photoshop articles as well, you may remember the Color Variations feature. Once again we rely upon this command as a somewhat simpler version also exists in Photoshop Elements.

Click Enhance/Adjust Color/Color Variations and the above dialog appears. The image in the upper right corner will show the results of your changes. At the bottom, colors and lightness can be set in three steps.

1. First, you have to specify the lightness interval in which you want to adjust colors. Midtones is the first choice. It is generally recommended for pictures with normal exposition, such as this one. Shadows and Highlights are pretty obvious, too. Saturation affects the strength of colors. Select Midtones.

2. The Adjust Color slider allows you to specify the steps in which the adjustment happens. As we just want to remove a slight blueish color veil, we should choose size 1.

3. In the lower right corner, you can click small preview images that increase or decrease the levels of the different color ranges. They are:

Increase Red/Green/Blue
Decrease Red/Green/Blue
Lighten
Darken

Opposite to blue, reds are the weakest in this photo, so we clicked Increase Red to enhance them a bit. This brought warmth into the colors of the picture. The dominance of blues was restricted by clicking Decrease Blue. You can click a preview image multiple times to take more than one step in the adjustment.

3. The alternative
There is another way to carry out this task. It is called Remove Color Cast, introduced earlier. It can be found in the same submenu.
The feature displays an eyedropper with which you can click a white, grey or black pixel in the photo, or more precisely, a pixel that should be white, grey or black. Photoshop Elements then adjusts all the colors according to this choice.

In this article, the statue was fortunately grey, giving us a nice reference point for the adjustment.

4. Warmer lights
Steps 2 and 3 can be carried out in sequence, but applying only one of them may also give good results.

The summer sunshine has returned into the picture. If you still see too much blue in the shadows, carry on adjusting the picture with Shadows selected on the Color Variations dialog. Hover the mouse pointer above the image above to see the difference.

Now we take a break and return shortly with the next step of the project.