Editing Tips for Snow Scenes

Digital cameras can give snow a bluish cast. Here's how to fix the problem.

Dave Johnson

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Feature: Making Your Snow as White as Snow

While I'm not a huge fan of driving into town on snowy and icy roads, I think that newly fallen snow is one of the most beautiful sights you'll ever see on this pretty little globe of ours.

Every winter, I trudge outdoors to shoot some snow scenes--whether it's a close-up of ice crystals on a pine cone, snow clinging to a wolf's thick coat, or just snow weighing down evergreens in my backyard. If you do the same, you may notice that many digital cameras can't quite figure out what the right colors are in such pictures. That's not just your imagination; digital cameras have trouble with snow scenes because they contain so much pure white. As a result, they are notorious for giving snow a bluish cast.

This week, let's talk about how to restore the proper colors and make "white as snow" an accurate description of our photos.

Set the Camera's White Balance

The first thing you can do to fix the color in your snow photos is to make sure the camera's white balance setting is accurate.

If your camera has a manual white balance adjustment, you should use it when you get outdoors in the snow. Bring a white piece of paper and have someone hold it in the direction that you plan to take pictures, so it gets the same sun exposure as the scene you're photographing. Then change your camera's white balance mode to manual and set it while pointing the camera at the paper. You should check your camera's user guide for details on how to do this. Remember to return the camera's white balance to automatic after taking your snow shots.

If you can't adjust the white balance this way, at least switch your exposure mode to its Sand and Snow mode or a similar setting, which should help a bit.

Detecting a Color Cast

How do you know if your digital photos suffer from a color cast? It's not always easy to see. After all, we tend to trust what our eyes show us, and it's easy to interpret off-white as true white in a lot of cases. Look at this photo of a dog in a snowy field, for instance. The scene looks okay, right? In reality, my digital camera shifted all the colors toward blue, so the snow is not nearly as white as it should be. Let's save this photo to our hard drive and then try to fix it; you can compare this first image to the corrected photo later.

Try the Auto Fix

Your first line of defense against blue snow is your image editor. Most programs have a color and exposure auto fix, and it generally works pretty well.

With the photo open in Jasc Paint Shop Pro, for instance, find the Photo toolbar at the top of your screen. Click Enhance Photo, then One Step Photo Fix. (If you don't see the Photo Toolbar, select View, Toolbars, Photo to load it.) The program will run through a handful of corrections, including color balance and exposure corrections. Sometimes the change is dramatic. If you like the result, you're done. If you're not happy, choose Edit, Undo One Step Photo Fix.

So you've got a more expanded view of your options, let's try to fix the picture another way.

Tweak the Color Balance

Sometimes the auto fix tool won't quite be up to the task of correcting a blue tint in snow. For these cases, bring out the big gun: the manual white point control.

In Paint Shop Pro, choose Adjust, Color Balance, Black and White Points. This dialog box lets you tell the program which color in the picture should be white. Paint Shop Pro will then repaint the entire picture accordingly. If all goes well, the whites will be white, the reds will be red, and every other color will be just the way it should be.

Click the eyedropper icon under the white color box and then in the left window carefully click on a region that should be pure white--like snow in sunlight. The picture in the window on the right should snap into true color. If you nailed it, click OK. Otherwise, click again until you find the right spot. Here's what happened when I used this tool on the my dog picture.

Keep in mind that this is a somewhat sensitive tool, and you can get a variety of effects--from great to so-so to "what on earth is that?"--by clicking the eyedropper in various places in the scene. As luck would have it, I got excellent results on my very first click; my editor wasn't nearly as happy with his results. If at first you don't get what you like, it's worth experimenting to see if you can do better with a few extra clicks.

Dave's Favorites: Seattle's Best Photos of 2004

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. So this week, I'm going to let my favorite largely speak for itself. It's a roundup of the hundred or so best photos of 2004 taken by the staff photographers at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle's leading newspaper. You'll find some truly wonderful photos that just might help inspire you to grab your own camera and do some shooting. Enjoy!

Q&A: Which ISO Setting Should I Use?

I have a digital camera with ISO settings of 100, 200, and 400. Which is the best one to use, and are these ratings the same as the ASA ratings used in film?

--Dobre Gene, Green Lane, Pennsylvania

That's a good question, Dobre.

ISO is a system used to identify how sensitive your camera is to light. When set at ISO 100, your camera is exactly half as sensitive as when it's set to ISO 200. So a scene that would need a 1/60 second exposure at ISO 100 would need 1/125 second at ISO 200 or 1/250 second at ISO 400.

And yes, ISO is the same as ASA. ASA, by the way, is an obsolete term--it was replaced by ISO about 15 years ago.

So which ISO setting is best? My advice is to use the lowest setting possible, and crank it up only when you have no choice--such as when you're shooting at night, without a flash. Using a lower ISO minimizes the inevitable digital noise that can create pixels of random color in your picture, kind of like the "grain" you see in film photography.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This Week's Hot Pic: "Portrait of an Iguana," by Anita N. Hogue, Spencer, Tennessee

Anita says that she took this photo of an iguana while it was hanging out around the docks in South Florida. She took the picture with her Sony DSC-F828.