white balance in raw files - raw files are your friends

following up on Trish's & Donna's comments on the last post... Here is my non-expert advice of what has worked for me... 
​I did subscribe to the photos shop suite... so I think I can also explore the other programs. :)
​when I get the file into Photoshop with the raw file the first thing, beside making a copy, the one thing I learned in Photoshop is make a copy (which in the regular editor is make a new layer) is to set the white balance. This is easy to do with the little eye dropper icon on the upper right.

Then you want to sample different places on the image where there is some white so you get the right light. You can set this in the camera by setting the white balance in the shooting menu for the temperature of light -- lots of stuff on line about this -- but in raw files you can over reach any camera setting so - yay.

Below left I took a sample on the white grey door and that seemed the best overall. Once I did that I was able to brighten the whites and deepen the shadows all before I went to regular Photoshop to edit the Jpg.

to the right the eye dropper is on a blue white area and it gave the picture a blue cast. Below I put it on the orange white  part of the flower and it warmed up the light a good deal.
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​These are just pictures of the screen from my cell phone, so it's a little difficult to see the color, but it's quite dramatic when you're editing.

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Another way to balance the dark/light, once you have made the changes in RAW is to use the histogram feature in regular Photoshop to balance the white dark ratio. This can be a big issue when shooting water colors. Notice I've moved the little triangle marker up to the right of the 'hill' in the histogram. :) Remember always make new layers!

Again, I welcome comments -- to get to the comment section one has to separate the post from the blog by clicking on the title. maybe there is a better way to see them, I'll have to figure that out on weebly.

Also most important - JPGs are not forever - each time you open and resave a change the format re-sizes the image and crunches the data a bit.

​Save the original RAW file, the original Photoshop format as well as the JPG so you can make changes if needed.