Tint: The Subtle Colour Shift You Didn’t Know You Were Using
After colour temperature, tint is usually the next control people encounter—and often the one they ignore. Temperature feels intuitive: warmer or cooler, more orange or more blue. Tint, by contrast, looks mysterious, sometimes unnecessary, and is often left untouched.
Yet tint is quietly doing a lot of work in almost every photograph you take.
What Is Tint?
Tint is a correction along the green–magenta axis.
Where colour temperature deals with blue versus yellow light, tint deals with the imbalance between green and magenta that cameras and sensors often struggle to resolve.
This imbalance is rarely obvious in everyday viewing, but when it’s wrong, images can feel subtly “off”:
skin tones look slightly sickly
whites appear muddy
shadows take on an unnatural cast
You may not immediately identify tint as the problem—but your eye knows something isn’t right.
Why Cameras Struggle with Tint
Cameras are very good at correcting for average daylight. They are much less confident when faced with artificial or mixed lighting. Many modern light sources—LEDs, fluorescents, energy-saving bulbs—produce light with uneven spectral output. The camera’s automatic systems try to compensate, but green and magenta shifts are particularly difficult to judge.
This is why interiors often look a little green, or why photographs taken under certain streetlights feel oddly magenta. The camera is guessing—and sometimes guessing badly.
Tint in Interiors
WGPC members will recognise this immediately in interior photographs. A room lit by a mixture of daylight and household lighting can look fine to our eyes, yet unpleasant on screen.
Auto white balance may settle on a reasonable colour temperature, but tint often remains skewed. Walls may appear slightly green, faces a little unhealthy, and neutral surfaces refuse to look neutral.
A small adjustment of tint—often just a nudge away from green—can suddenly make the image feel natural and comfortable.
Tint and Landscape Photography
Tint matters outdoors too, especially in shade, woodland, and overcast conditions. Green foliage reflects light back into the scene, and cameras can overcompensate, producing images that feel cold or lifeless.
This is why some landscapes feel better with a slight magenta bias, even if that feels counter-intuitive at first. It’s not about making the scene colourful—it’s about restoring balance.
Tint and Black & White Conversion
As with colour temperature, tint continues to matter even when the final image is monochrome.
Tint affects how colours are weighted before conversion to black and white. A green-heavy image may convert with flat mid-tones and weak separation. A slight shift towards magenta can improve contrast, texture, and tonal clarity—even though the colour itself disappears.
If a black and white image feels dull or muddy, it’s often worth revisiting the tint in the colour version before conversion.
Learning to Use Tint Creatively
The key to using tint is restraint. Large adjustments are rarely needed. Think of tint as fine-tuning rather than correction.
Instead of asking “what should this be?”, ask:
Do whites look clean or muddy?
Do skin tones feel healthy?
Does the image feel balanced?
When tint is right, you rarely notice it. When it’s wrong, you can’t quite relax into the image.
Bringing It Together
Colour temperature sets the emotional direction of an image. Tint refines the balance. Together, they form the foundation of colour control in digital photography.
Once you understand both, you stop fighting your camera’s decisions and start guiding them. You’re no longer correcting mistakes—you’re shaping interpretation.
In the next article, we’ll bring colour temperature and tint together in a short practical workflow, showing how a few deliberate adjustments can dramatically change the feel of an image—whether colour or black and white.