In another article, called Removing the Color Gradient From Your Images, I showed you how to remove the color gradient from your images.

Sometimes the effect produced by that process is too strong – it can end up removing too much color. The process I cover here is similar to the other one, except that it is not as strong. This process offers an alternative that might be more suitable for your images.

The Result

Here is an image of the Helix nebula that has a soft color cast to it:

Although the image is dark and there’s good detail in the nebula, it could be darker by removing the light blue color cast from the whole image.

Here’s the same image, except this time I have removed the light blue color cast:

The image is darker, the nebula is more vibrant, and there hasn’t been any loss in the details.

You can accomplish the same effect using the steps that follow.

Removing a Soft Color Gradient Using Photopea

I have written about using the online image editor Photopea a number of times. It is a good alternative to buying and installing Photoshop. It’s better than the free photo editing software called GIMP because there’s nothing to install on your system to be able to use it.

The nice thing about Photopea is that the menu selections are very similar between it and Photoshop, so you can follow these directions using that software too.

You start Photopea by visiting this site: https://www.photopea.com/

I don’t discuss the basics of using Photopea here, but you should be able to follow along anyway.

Start by opening your image (select File – Open, and locate your image).

If you don’t have an image with a gradient on it, download the ZIP file that contains the before and after images and use the ‘before’ image to try out these steps.

Next, duplicate the background layer by finding it in the Layers panel on the right, right-click the one called ‘Background’ and select Duplicate Layer as shown:

From the menu select Filter – Noise – Dust and Scratches to bring up a new window as shown:

Enter or select the values as shown – Radius 100px and Threshold 2px. This makes a dramatic change to your image, which is expected.

Set the layer’s opacity to 50% by clicking the arrow next to the Opacity option in the Layers panel and select or enter 50%, as shown:

Select the Blending Mode to Color by clicking the arrow next to where it says ‘Normal’ and locate ‘Color’, as shown:

From the menu, select Image – Adjustments – Invert. This will change your image to appear black and white.

Merge the layers by selecting from the menu Layer – Merge Down. This merges the layer you created earlier with the original layer.

Adjust the Hue and Saturation by selecting from the menu Image – Adjustments – Hue/Saturation, and enter or select the values as shown:

Enter or select the following values: Hue=0, Saturation=50, and Lightness=0. This returns the color back to your image.

Save your image by selecting File – Save as PSD or Export As to save it in the format you want to use.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to remove a soft color gradient from your images by using Photopea to manipulate an image.

Check out my other posts in my blog where there are more tutorials and other articles.