5 Tips to Fix Mucky Whites

Shooting against white is a pain in the bottom, it really is.

Many of the usual styles of shooting just don’t work with a white background, leaving you with a dull, flat grey colour.

So these are my top 5 tips for fixing ‘meh’ white backgrounds and making them more ‘wow’.

1. Don’t shoot from the light.

If you are shooting from the source of the light into the room then the background will become the darkest point in the photo & that is what causes the ‘meh’ grey effect.

So whenever possible avoid shooting from the light.

2. Remove colour casts

I set my white balance based on the babies skin tone rather than the background.

So often I’ll leave the white balance a little warm as that tends to best suit the baby and then fix the white background in Photoshop.

There are many different ways to get rid of the colour casts, but I find most are too heavy meaning that you’d then have to carefully mask it off of baby which takes ages.

The best way I’ve found to do it is to make a new layer in PS, go into ‘Filters’, then ‘Camera Raw Filter’ and then ‘Colour Mixer’. Within the Saturation tab you can then remove the offending colours, come out and you shouldn’t have to mask it off of baby, but if you do just a quick, messy mask will be perfect.

3. Add contrast.

Contrast works wonders for white backgrounds and gives skin tone more depth while also giving more punch between the baby and the white background.

4. Curves layers

If you don’t use curves layers then I wholly recommend you try them, they’re amazing!

The first simple one to try is clicking on the top of the line and dragging it slightly to the left, you’ll see the highlights in your image immediately get brighter.

So if you shoot with the background being one the lightest point of the image, then pulling up the highlights via curves will have a great impact on the white background.

5. Graduated filter

I’ve tried the gradient tool in Photoshop and Lightroom to help brighten one side of a white background, but found both of these to be a bit heavy handed and they don’t look very real or natural.

But Adobe Camera Raw has a great tool called the graduated filter which gives a really lovely soft, natural brightness to the area of the image you apply it to.

You can get to this tool via Photoshop simply by clicking on ‘filters’, ‘camera raw filter’ and then select ‘Graduated Filter’ in the right hand side panel.