White balance
Warm / cool color temperature.
This runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
About White balance
Shifts an image warmer or cooler on a -60 to +60 scale by moving the red and blue channels in opposite directions, with the whole calculation inside your browser.
Indoor photos under old bulbs come out orange. Photos taken in open shade come out blue. Your eye corrects for this while you're standing there and the camera frequently doesn't, so you end up with a picture that feels wrong without looking obviously broken. This slider pushes an image back along that warm-to-cool axis until the neutrals read as neutral again.
The arithmetic is plain. Your slider value is added to the red channel and subtracted from the blue one, with green left alone. Positive warms, negative cools, across a range of -60 to 60. It's a linear shift rather than a genuine chromatic adaptation, so it approximates what a Kelvin control does without modelling any particular light source.
Two things follow from it being addition. Pixels that were already neutral get shifted along with the ones that weren't, so a heavy correction tints the entire frame instead of only the cast. And the channels clip: at +60, any red above 195 pins to 255 and any blue below 60 pins to 0, which flattens deep blues and bright skin alike. Under about 25 is usually plenty.
How to use White balance
- 1Drop the photo onto the panel, or click to browse for it.
- 2Move the Temperature slider — positive is warmer, negative cooler, across -60 to 60.
- 3Click Apply preview and look at something in the frame you know should be white or grey.
- 4Click Download to save the corrected file.
What it won't do
- Warm-cool only; there is no green-magenta tint axis.
- Already-neutral areas shift too, because the same amount is added everywhere.
- Large values clip red and blue, which can flatten saturated parts of the image.
Common questions
Is this the same as white balance in a raw editor?
Not quite. A raw editor works on sensor data before the image is assembled, using a colour temperature model plus a separate green-magenta tint control. This adds and subtracts fixed amounts from the red and blue channels of a finished image. For a mild cast the results look similar; for a severe one they won't match.
Which direction is warm?
Positive. Moving the slider up adds red and removes blue, which is what makes an image feel warmer, like late afternoon light. Negative does the reverse and cools it towards shade or overcast. Zero leaves the file untouched, and the full range runs from -60 to 60.
Can it fix a green cast from fluorescent lighting?
No. This only moves the red-blue axis, and a fluorescent cast sits on the green-magenta one. Nothing on the site offers a tint control of that kind. The nearest workaround is a small hue rotation in the saturation and hue tool, which will affect every colour in the frame rather than only the cast.
How do I know when the cast is gone?
Find something in the shot that ought to be neutral — a white wall, a sheet of paper, a grey pavement — and adjust until it stops looking tinted. The colour picker tool reads exact RGB values under your cursor, and a genuinely neutral pixel has red, green and blue within a few points of one another.
Related tools
Why this one doesn't upload your file
There is no server to upload to. This page is a static file, and the work happens in your browser using the same graphics and WebAssembly code that renders every other site you visit. Your file is read from disk into memory, processed, and handed back as a download. Once the page has loaded you can disconnect from the network entirely and it keeps working. The longer explanation