Neutralizing color involves returning the colors in an image to the colors that a viewer would have perceived when standing beside the camera. Most film or video images depart from that ideal to some degree, and some depart from it dramatically.

One way to think about neutralizing color is to imagine working on a project where every shot includes a large card that we know is, when viewed in ideal lighting conditions, a perfectly neutral midgray color. If you can correct each image so the card appears midgray when your audience views the final program, all other colors in the images should be correct also.

Though you cannot normally have such a perfect measuring device in your images, it is useful to select an area of each image as a target for your color neutralizing adjustments. If you focus on getting the color in that area right, color in the rest of the image should fall into place. In some images, there might be an object or area that should be neutral gray, or nearly so, and you can use that area as your principal target as you make adjustments. In fact, this is exactly how you make corrections to remove color casts using the Remove Color Cast buttons. In other images, you might not have any gray color at all, but you will almost certainly have some other area where even a small departure from neutral color is noticeable. Human skin is probably the most common example. Or you might choose to focus on an area where you know the true color, such as a person's hair.

In addition to identifying parts of your image on which to concentrate your attention, it is useful to establish how the uncorrected image departs from neutral color before you attempt to correct it.

Sometimes this is obvious. You cannot mistake an image with an extreme pink or yellow cast. When the problem is more subtle, you can sample a few areas with the Color Match eyedropper to get information about the color characteristics of the image. Areas that should be white or black are particularly helpful, since these are easily identifiable colors that should have nearly identical values for red, green, and blue. If the red value is higher than the other two, the image has a red cast. If red and green are higher than blue, the image has a yellow cast.

You can neutralize color using different controls in the Color Correction tool. For example, you can use the Curves tab to adjust the proportions of each color. Or you can use the Hue Offsets ChromaWheel controls, which allow you to quickly locate the sector of the wheel that represents the color cast in the image, and then adjust in the opposite direction to that color. You can make either of these adjustments automatically using the Auto Balance buttons, and then fine-tune manually if necessary.

The more experienced you become as a colorist, the better you will get at judging even subtle color problems by eye and knowing intuitively what kinds of adjustments to make.