Remove yellow and blue casts from listing photos.

The camera needs something it knows is neutral

White balance works by identifying a surface that should be colourless and shifting the whole image until it is. In a property photo that reference is usually a white ceiling, a white door frame, or white sanitaryware. Problems begin when the room contains no true neutral, which is common in interiors finished in warm greys, creams, and timber, because the correction then has nothing reliable to anchor to and guesses.

That guess is why a room with oak floors and cream walls so often comes back looking blue. The algorithm treated the warm floor as a neutral that had drifted orange and corrected against it, cooling every other surface in the process. Anchoring deliberately to a genuinely white surface avoids this entirely.

Two light sources, one photograph

A single colour cast is straightforward to correct. Two are not, because a room lit by warm bulbs on one side and cool daylight on the other has no single correction that fixes both — neutralising the lamp side pushes the window side blue, and vice versa. This is the situation that produces the split-colour interiors common in evening listing photos.

The practical fix happens before the shutter rather than after it. Turning off the artificial lights and shooting on available daylight gives one source and one correction. Where mixed light is unavoidable, the correction should favour whichever source dominates the area a viewer will look at first, and accept a slight cast elsewhere rather than splitting the difference and getting both wrong.

• Turn off lamps when there is enough daylight to shoot without them
• Include a genuinely white surface in frame as a reference
• Shoot before sunset when daylight still dominates the room
• Avoid mixing overhead LEDs with warm table lamps in one frame