Use your editing app’s white balance or temperature tool, adjusting it against something in the photo that should look neutral white or grey, until skin tones and colours look natural.
What you need
- The flash photo with an odd colour cast
- Google Photos, Apple Photos, or Photoshop Elements
- 5 to 10 minutes
Find a neutral reference point
The easiest way to correct white balance accurately is to find something in the photo that should be a neutral colour — white clothing, a grey wall, even the whites of someone’s eyes — and use that as your reference point, rather than adjusting by feel alone.
How to correct the white balance
- Open the photo in your editing app and find the white balance or colour temperature tool — in Photoshop Elements it is under Enhance, then Adjust Color, then Adjust Color for Skin Tone, which is particularly good for portraits; in Google Photos and Apple Photos it is a Warmth or Tint slider under Adjust.
- If using Adjust Color for Skin Tone in Elements, click directly on a person’s skin in the photo — Elements automatically corrects the whole image’s colour balance based on that click.
- If using a Warmth/Tint slider instead, find something in the photo that should look neutral white or grey, and nudge the sliders until that area looks genuinely neutral rather than orange or blue.
- Check skin tones across the whole photo once adjusted — they should look like a normal indoor photo, not sunburnt or washed out blue.
- Make small adjustments rather than large ones — white balance corrections that go too far in the other direction can look just as wrong as the original cast.
- Save your corrected version under a new file name.
Check skin tones look natural
Look at skin tones and any known-white or known-grey objects in the photo — they should look natural under normal indoor lighting, not still tinted orange or blue. If you have another photo from the same event with more natural colour, compare the two.
If there’s no clean white or grey spot
If Adjust Color for Skin Tone in Elements gives an odd result, click a different, more clearly lit area of skin rather than a shadowed part of the face. If manual sliders are not landing on a natural-looking result, try your app’s Auto colour correction first as a starting point, then fine-tune manually from there.
Next step
Reduce noise in a photo taken on an old phone is a common companion fix for indoor flash photos, which are often both noisy and colour-cast.
Sources and date checked
Adobe Photoshop Elements Help (Adjust Color for Skin Tone) and Google Photos/Apple Photos Help on white balance adjustments. Checked 22 September 2026.