If only he shot RAW, or at least owned full Photoshop

One of my friends at a local camera club shot entire day outside with his camera set at tungsten white balance. I started to provide a solution for digitally correcting the images and ran up across several problems.

- He has 150+ images he wants to save
- Every single one of them was shot in JPEG
- He is using Elements 4

So we can't adjust the white balance in the RAW converter. Also, as far as I know in Elements 4, we can't put together an action to do it once and repeat for the remaining 149 images.

Any suggestions for trying to handle this quickly?

Plan B is to bring him over along with a cd of his images, write the action on my machine with CS2, and let it run. I suspect this is what we'll be doing, but it never hurts to ask.

I don't know what's in Elements, but in the full version you can to Image->Adjustments->Photo Filter and use one of the cooling filters (set the intensity to a level that produces the best result). Record an action and batch-process the files.

Guy

That filter is in Elements 4 (which is all I have) Guy, but Elements 4 doesn't support actions. You can run some actions (quite a few actually) by creating a new filter out of them, but you can't actually create an action in Elements 4.

If you're going to stick with Elements 4, better than using a cooling filter would be to use the Enhance->Adjust Color->Remove Color Cast option (unless every image really should have the identical white balance). This lets you click on anything in the image that should be neutral. This is assuming that there is something in the image that should be neutral gray, black, or white.

The other option in Elements 4 is File->Process Multiple Files and use the "Auto Color" option. I'm not sure what this will do to the images, but it might be useful.

So Elements 4 isn't the greatest option for batching, but my question is : What exactly are you going to automate in CS? Are you going to assume they should all have been the same white balance, and try to use cooling filters to correct to that temp for all of them?

I don't know that I'd want to do 150 of them, so the first step would be to narrow it down to half a dozen or so of the best. For real Q&D color adjustment I use the white eyedropper in Levels. Just pick something in the image that's supposed to be true white, select the white eyedropper and click on that spot. Don't like the results? Pick another white spot. You could technically do the same with the black eyedropper on blacks and the gray on gray, but I always have the best luck with white. If there's nothing white in the image, then it gets pretty impirical.

Plan 'B' sounds like the way to go.

You might have good luck with adjusting the WB in ACR with those JPEG files, even though you won't have a 'blank slate' to work with as you would with RAW files.

David, you last paragraph more or less summarizes what I would do in CS2. I figure I would still be off a bit on a lot of them, but I am hoping to get close enough on most of them quickly enough to save him a fair number of hours of additional work. He still have to do some fine tuning on the results, but it would (hopefully) be an improvement over where things currently lie.

Thanks for the suggestions, folks.

Dan - I'd still give it a shot with auto color and/or auto levels in Elements batch processing. It won't overwrite the original files if you tell it to rename, so it's worth a shot. And it's fairly quick - probably will take 15 minutes or less to run.