How to Remove a Green Cast from Blonde Hair?

Guide to Color Correcting Blonde Hair Color Problem

 

One of my pet peeves is green casts in blonde hair. It looks awful--like a hair color disaster! Unfortunately many digital cameras have a problem with blonde hair in low lighting and this issue is fairly common even with high-end cameras. Fortunately, however, it is actually pretty easy to fix this problem.

At first glance when you see what looks like a green tint in the blonde, you might tend to think you have to adjust the green levels. But the problem is with a lack of red. So instead of changing magenta's, you can make it look right with an adjustment to Cyan in the Yellows. 

Even after the hair color is improved, the picture still looks flat. It needs more brightness and contrast.

After Brightness +25 and Contrast + 35.

That's not bad, but Leslie Grossman's white sweater still looks dull. Let's try Auto Levels and see what happens.

That punched up the brightness and contrast nicely. And now it looks more like the picture could have been taken outside in the sun instead of inside with poor lighting.

Speaking of highlights, the Photoshop user needs to pay special attention to the brightest and darkest parts of an image during the correction process. When an image is brightened up with Brightness or Levels, for example, as it was in the above example, it may "blow out" the highlights and compromise the integrity of the image through loss of detail, because the brightness of all parts of the image is often increased with adjustment layers, not just the parts that need it.

One trick to brighten a photo but not blow out the highlights is to adjust the lowest fields (Output Levels) in the dialog box for Levels at the end or near the end of the correction process. An adjustment of only 5 may suffice and be the final difference between an amateur and professional look.

Always pay special attention to portraits where the subject has blonde hair. Blondes, of course, are most likely to have white or virtually white "highlights." (With brunettes there is rarely the same problem; with them the issue is parts of hair being too dark.) But you still need to pay attention to teeth and whites of eyes when cranking up brightness even if the hair is perfect.

In cases where adjustments to an entire photo are too harsh, you may have to isolate parts of the image with the Lasso tool, feather it by 1-10 (or more), for a natural color/tonal transition, and then add the adjustment layer only to that section. With experience you're learn when you need to isolate part of the pic, and when it's not necessary.

Tip: One way to isolate the whitest parts of an image is to use Select > Color Range > Select > Highlights.