LuttieWhite Balance Corrector
Drag temperature and tint to neutralise a colour cast and watch what happens to a mid-grey reference at the same time. The channel gains behind the correction are shown so you can see exactly what the adjustment does to your pixels.
Assumed light
Neutral grey becomes
Channel gains
R 1.000 · G 1.000 · B 1.000
White balance is the foundation, not a creative choice
Every creative grade you apply sits on top of your white balance. If the base is wrong, you spend the rest of the session fighting it: skin goes waxy when you add warmth, shadows turn muddy when you add contrast, and secondaries refuse to isolate cleanly because the hues are not where the software expects them. Fixing white balance first means everything downstream behaves predictably.
The reliable technique is to find something in frame you know should be neutral. Concrete, white walls, grey clothing, and the whites of eyes all work. Correct until that object reads neutral, then make your creative decisions from there. If you control the shoot, photographing an 18% grey card at the start of each lighting setup removes the guesswork entirely.
Diagnosing a cast by its colour
Orange cast
Tungsten or warm LED lighting recorded on a daylight white balance setting. Lower the temperature value.
Blue cast
Open shade or overcast daylight recorded on a tungsten setting. Raise the temperature value.
Green cast
Almost always fluorescent or cheap LED. Temperature will not fix it, push tint toward magenta.
Magenta cast
Over-correction from a previous green fix, or certain LED panels at low output. Pull tint back toward green.
Mixed cast across the frame
Two light sources at different temperatures. No global correction solves this, you need a mask or an HSL secondary.
Why mixed lighting is the hard case
A single white balance setting applies one correction to the whole frame. When a subject is lit by a tungsten practical on one side and daylight through a window on the other, no single value is correct for both. Correct for the tungsten and the window goes electric blue. Correct for the window and the practical goes orange. The real fixes are to gel your lights so they match at the point of capture, or to isolate one region with a qualifier or a mask and correct it separately in post.
Where white balance lives in each application
| Software | Where to find it |
|---|---|
| DaVinci Resolve | Colour page, Camera Raw panel for RAW clips, or the Temperature and Tint controls in the primaries wheels |
| Premiere Pro | Lumetri Colour panel, Basic Correction tab, White Balance section with an eyedropper selector |
| Final Cut Pro | Colour inspector, Balance Colour set to Manual, or the Colour Wheels temperature control |
| Lightroom / Camera Raw | Basic panel at the top, with the eyedropper for sampling a neutral target |
| Luttie | Temperature and Tint sliders in the editor, applied non-destructively to RAW and standard image files |
Frequently asked questions
Is this white balance tool free?
Yes. Adjusting white balance here is free with no account needed, and nothing is uploaded. Saving the result as a reusable .cube LUT requires Luttie Pro, but you can correct and compare images here at no cost.
Why does raising Kelvin make my image warmer?
The slider sets what the software assumes the scene lighting was, not what the image becomes. Telling it the light was bluish, meaning a high Kelvin value, makes it compensate by adding warmth. This is the same convention Lightroom, Camera Raw, and DaVinci Resolve use, and it catches almost everyone out at first.
What is the difference between temperature and tint?
Temperature moves along the blue to amber axis, which is where most natural light variation sits. Tint moves along the green to magenta axis, which is where artificial light variation sits. Fluorescent and LED sources often need a tint correction that no amount of temperature adjustment will fix.
Can I fix white balance without shooting RAW?
Partly. In a RAW file white balance is only metadata, so changing it in post is mathematically lossless. In a JPEG or an already-compressed video file the original white balance is baked into the pixel values, so correcting a strong cast stretches the remaining data and can introduce banding or colour noise.
Correct white balance on RAW files straight from your camera.
CR2, ARW, NEF, and DNG decode in the browser with white balance still fully editable.
Open the editor →