How to Fix Mixed Lighting and Wrong Skin Tones

To fix mixed lighting, stop searching for one white balance that suits both sources, because none exists. Set the global white balance for the light falling on the face, mask the areas lit by the other source and correct them with feathered local adjustments, then correct skin tone on its own at the end. Where the mix of light gives the scene its mood, correct the skin and leave the room as it is.

A window on one side and a tungsten lamp on the other. Daylight through a doorway and fluorescent tubes overhead. Flash on the subject and street lighting behind. Each produces the same result: a frame where no single white balance is correct.

Photographers spend a long time dragging the temperature slider back and forth on these files, and it never settles because the value they are looking for does not exist. Correct for the window and the lamp side turns orange. Correct for the lamp and the window side turns blue.

What has happened

Different light sources have different colour. A camera applies one white balance to the whole sensor. When parts of the frame are lit by two sources in different proportions, a single global correction cannot be right everywhere.

So stop looking for one.

The method

1. Correct globally for the source lighting the face

Not the brightest source and not the one covering the largest area: the one falling on the face. That is what a viewer judges everything else against.

Use the whites of the eyes or a neutral part of the clothing as your reference. Walls are painted and make poor references.

2. Look at what is now wrong

The other source now looks clearly off. That is expected, and it is progress, because the problem has changed from global to local.

3. Mask the areas lit by the other source

Use your raw processor's local adjustments: a brush, a gradient, or a luminance or colour-range mask, whichever suits the shape of the light.

Light falls off gradually, so the boundary is rarely sharp. Feather generously; a hard-edged colour correction is more visible than the cast you started with.

4. Correct temperature and tint inside the mask

Adjust until the two areas agree. The aim is one consistent look, not two separately neutral areas. Fluorescent and some LED sources shift colour along the green–magenta tint axis as well as temperature, so check tint as well.

5. Correct skin on its own, last

The most important step, and the one most often skipped.

Get skin right at the end, independently of the rest of the frame. People carry an accurate sense of what skin should look like and almost none for the colour of a wall. A frame with slightly green walls and correct skin looks fine; neutral walls with green skin look broken.

Use a skin-tone tool if your raw processor has one, or an HSL adjustment targeted at the orange and red ranges and masked to the skin.

6. Decide whether to keep a cast on purpose

Sometimes the mixed light is the picture. A warm interior against a cool blue window is a look rather than a fault, and neutralising both produces something duller than what you photographed.

Correct the skin, leave the room, and the frame reads as intentional.

Two situations worth handling specifically

Flash against evening ambient light

The familiar mismatch: a correctly lit subject in front of a dark, colour-shifted background.

Work in this order. Lift the ambient background and correct its colour first, so the setting reads as evening rather than underexposure. Then soften the edges of the flash falloff so the subject blends into the background. Then match the foreground to the corrected background.

Starting with the subject means matching the background to a subject lit differently from everything around them.

Overhead sun on location

Hard midday light bounces off the ground into the underside of the face. The chin and neck pick up the ground's colour: green from grass, warm from sand, blue-grey from tarmac.

Correct the underside of the face separately from the top. It is a small mask, and it changes how the whole portrait reads.

Getting it right in camera

Photograph a grey card at the start of each lighting setup to give yourself a reference to click on. Gel your flash to match the ambient light — a warming gel for tungsten, a green gel for fluorescent — and the mismatch never reaches the file. And where you can, switching off one of the sources is quicker than correcting it later.

None of that helps the file you already have, but it is how photographers who work in mixed light stop having this problem.

When the light changes across a whole set

Mixed light within one frame is a correction job. Mixed light across a set — forty frames each slightly different because the daylight moved while you worked — is a matching job, and it needs a finished reference frame, frames grouped by lighting and a final pass in grid view. How to Make an Entire Photo Gallery Look Consistent sets that method out.

If you are outsourcing the set, include a reference frame in the brief, because references are what let a retoucher match your colour tone and finish. Standard Retouching includes colour correction and exposure and contrast adjustment at $4 per image. Where frames have to match closely, High-End Photo Retouching includes colour correction and tone matching.

Common questions

Can I fix mixed lighting on a JPEG? To a point, but a raw file gives far more room for separate white balance corrections in different parts of the frame. Corrections on a JPEG break into banding and colour noise sooner.

Which light source should I correct for first? The one lighting the face, regardless of which is brighter or covers more of the frame.

Why does skin still look green after I correct colour temperature? Fluorescent and some LED lights add a green or magenta cast on the tint axis rather than the temperature axis. Correct tint in the affected area as well.

How do I remove the green cast from grass under the chin? Mask the underside of the face and the neck, and correct that area separately from the top of the face. The bounce comes from below, so the cast sits only there.

Should I always neutralise everything? No. A warm interior against a cool window is often why the frame works. Correct the skin, then decide deliberately how much of the room's colour to keep.

Related reading: How to Recover Underexposed Portraits and How to Retouch Skin Without Making It Look Plastic.