Whenever I take photos of the Mandrills at the zoo as they crouch in the deep shade of a rocky wall, I always end up with a blue toned photos. They aren't so blue when the mandrill is standing out in the open, just too dark due to the large trees. None of my other photos taken of animals through glass (where the animals are in shade, turn out this way - none at all).

I orginally thought it was thick blue tinged glass in the viewing window.

Then I thought the deep shade added to the blue tone. Now I'm not sure of the reason.

As I don't know how to use the histogram or adjust the blues in my Canon EOS 500D (and am unlikely to learn due to short term memory probs associated with my health condition), can you tell me the easiest way to fix the blue in PSE9.

Just to clarify, I can only do simple 'Guided Editing' in PSE9 ie sharpen the focus, lighten the shadows, darken the highlights, balance the midtone contrast, cropping etc.

Full editing using layers etc is out of my reach at the moment (due to poor memory & cognitive dysfunction).

Besides, I want to be a good photographer, not a good photo editor, although I am happy to spend a couple of minutes 'tweaking' each photo.

Can someone please give me a quick, preferably 1 or 2 step answer that I can remember easily. I have about 30 reasonably good mandrill shots that need post processing to reduce that blue tone. I never get that blue tone in the other primate cages or enclosures (even shooting through glass). It's really bugging me.

Not sure whether I had the camera on Manual mode (with the camera giving me the shutterspeed) OR whether I'd switched to Aperture Priority by the time I got to the mandrills. Must have been Manual mode because I would never have known to put the Shutterspeed on 1/80 which is what is recorded.

F 5.6: (cause I'm too short-sighted to see the diff between the f stops)
ISO 800: (cause it's the easiest to leave my camera setting on for most of the day).
Shutterspeed: 1/80 (because that's what the camera automatically calculated???

I suppose you could say that at the zoo I tend to leave the camera settings on the same thing most of the day, because I purely & simply get so engrossed in watching the animals that I forget to change the settings for each photo lined up. This results in having to pp nearly every image.

One of these days I REALLY will learn how to use the camera settings properly, but in the meantime, this blue tone bugs me. First photo is the original. Second photo has had the focus sharpened, a few other light & contrast tweaks & colour de-saturated to try & remove the blue. Also, obviously, cropped. This is the best/most editing I can do so far.

Whenever I take photos of the Mandrills at the zoo as they crouch in the deep shade of a rocky wall, I always end up with a blue toned photos. They aren't so blue when the mandrill is standing out in the open, just too dark due to the large trees. None of my other photos taken of animals through glass (where the animals are in shade, turn out this way - none at all).

I orginally thought it was thick blue tinged glass in the viewing window.

Then I thought the deep shade added to the blue tone. Now I'm not sure of the reason.

As I don't know how to use the histogram or adjust the blues in my Canon EOS 500D (and am unlikely to learn due to short term memory probs associated with my health condition), can you tell me the easiest way to fix the blue in PSE9.

Just to clarify, I can only do simple 'Guided Editing' in PSE9 ie sharpen the focus, lighten the shadows, darken the highlights, balance the midtone contrast, cropping etc.

Full editing using layers etc is out of my reach at the moment (due to poor memory & cognitive dysfunction).

Besides, I want to be a good photographer, not a good photo editor, although I am happy to spend a couple of minutes 'tweaking' each photo.

Can someone please give me a quick, preferably 1 or 2 step answer that I can remember easily. I have about 30 reasonably good mandrill shots that need post processing to reduce that blue tone. I never get that blue tone in the other primate cages or enclosures (even shooting through glass). It's really bugging me.

Not sure whether I had the camera on Manual mode (with the camera giving me the shutterspeed) OR whether I'd switched to Aperture Priority by the time I got to the mandrills. Must have been Manual mode because I would never have known to put the Shutterspeed on 1/80 which is what is recorded.

F 5.6: (cause I'm too short-sighted to see the diff between the f stops)
ISO 800: (cause it's the easiest to leave my camera setting on for most of the day).
Shutterspeed: 1/80 (because that's what the camera automatically calculated???

I suppose you could say that at the zoo I tend to leave the camera settings on the same thing most of the day, because I purely & simply get so engrossed in watching the animals that I forget to change the settings for each photo lined up. This results in having to pp nearly every image.

One of these days I REALLY will learn how to use the camera settings properly, but in the meantime, this blue tone bugs me. First photo is the original. Second photo has had the focus sharpened, a few other light & contrast tweaks & colour de-saturated to try & remove the blue. Also, obviously, cropped. This is the best/most editing I can do so far.

I Agree that if you are shooting RAW it is very easy to remove a color cast. That is one of the reasons that I shoot in RAW.

But if you are shooting Jpegs there is an easy way to remove a color cast if PSE has a curves tool. I used this process when I was scanning slides on the Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 because the scanner produced a slight blue cast.

Here is the process in PS5. (see the screen shots)
1. Open the curves tool
2. Click the down arrow next to RGB and Select "Blue"
3. Click on the center of the diagonal line and drag down slightly until the blue cast goes away.

I've already used up the 'free trial' version of Adobe Lightroom about 12 months ago. I realised that I couldn't get my brain around how it worked, so opted to actually spend a bit of money & buy PSE9. I found the GUIDED section as easy as the free Picasa 3 I downloaded a couple of years ago.

I have also tried a couple of different picture styles and when they weren't what I wanted I couldn't remember what I had the camera setting on that worked well for other subjects. (Big Grin).

Short term memory probs are a real hassle when you want to learn something new. But I'll get there in the end.

I've written down your instructions for saving future images so will see how that pans out.

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Jeep D.

Victoria, Is this what you are looking for???

Dear Victoria,

I use photoshop elements too. Like you, I do not use the layers and the complicated part of the program. (Hope to learn it sometime perhaps.) I usually keep it simple with the "Guided" setup and it has worked very well for me.

Here is what I do to correct solve unwanted color hues:
Go to the "Remove a color cast" and use that tool to set the colors right. (If I forget to set the correct "white balance" setting on my camera, this program corrects the colors fairly well.)

Hope this helps.