Color Balance: Being color blind does not make this easy. I dont think the color is right and need some help to get this shot of my grandson with santa correct. Would like to make a...

tiger1640 Loc: Michigan

Being color blind does not make this easy. I dont think the color is right and need some help to get this shot of my grandson with santa correct. Would like to make a nice print to give to his parents. Thanks for helping.

Dreaming of Christmas

Graham Thirkill Loc: Idylic North Yorkshire, England UK.

One solution

hangman45 Loc: Hueytown Alabama

I guess this is a little better just can not seem to get it exactly like I wanted to.

tiger1640 Loc: Michigan

Graham Thirkill thank you but I guess I dont see any red, but then again being color blind it may be there.

hangman45 it seems to be closer to being natural and I thank you for you time and effort. I may make some prints of this one since I havent been able to get anything this good. I tried using PSE9 to auto correct but it didnt seem to work that well.

Thank you both and Happy Holidays!

Graham Thirkill Loc: Idylic North Yorkshire, England UK.

The red is definately there and as you say it's great now. Consider all the space though, above santa's head, I know it's the tree but IMHO I would crop the top, but I'm no expert.

gdwsr Loc: Northern California

tiger1640 wrote:

Being color blind does not make this easy. I dont think the color is right and need some help to get this shot of my grandson with santa correct. Would like to make a nice print to give to his parents. Thanks for helping.

No bells and whistles. You have multiple light sources in this scene making white balance correction difficult. I just balanced for Santa and the baby. If that is ok then good otherwise some layers and masking to make selective corrections will be needed.

I might have toned down the reds a bit too much for the suit to get the faces a little more normal. I can easily pull that back up ; maybe half way? I re-did it. UHH desaturates a lot. Open the Download to see it for real.

Wonderful shot.

Couldn't resist

hangman45 Loc: Hueytown Alabama

gdwsr wrote:

quote=tiger1640 Being color blind does not make t... (show quote)

That was the problem I was having the red on his face is the same as the red suit so to bring down the saturation on the face brought the suit down too much.

fotoslave

If you can isolate the red skin areas by any of the usual means in Photoshop or Elements, then do so first (like the circular marquee tool or the lasso tool. Then go to the editing area and choose Image-adjustments-hue saturation or colour balance. In the saturation box, choose "reds" and move the indicator to the left a bit until you get a lighter colour of the isolated area. My favourite, however, is to use the color balance tool and move the little indicators back or forth to achieve better results. You can also do this with all the photo selected, but the santa suit and all the other reds will lose their saturation as well. Might need another pair of eyes if you're colour-blind.
Another way is to lighten all the reds a bit, then isolate selected areas and work on those only.

tiger1640 Loc: Michigan

Thanks gdwsr, good job.
It was Santa's ideal to play that he was sleeping because my grandson would not wake up, so he thought it would make a great shot of them both sleeping "dreaming" about christmas...I love it!

sloscheider Loc: Minnesota

Lightroom 4 allows you to alter the white balance of a specific area of a photo so you could fix the skin tones while leaving everything else alone.

gdwsr Loc: Northern California

tiger1640 wrote:

Thanks gdwsr, good job.
It was Santa's ideal to play that he was sleeping because my grandson would not wake up, so he thought it would make a great shot of them both sleeping "dreaming" about christmas...I love it!

Glad it worked for you Merry Christmas.

rwinks Loc: Bloomington, IL

I tried many things and couldn't get it to what I thought was looking ok, so I switched to B/W. Maybe this looks ok to you. Food for thought.

farmerjim Loc: Rugby, England

I've had a go but not very good on skin tones, I need a tutorial in this sort of thing!

GHK Loc: The Vale of Eden

tiger1640 wrote:

Being color blind does not make this easy. I dont think the color is right and need some help to get this shot of my grandson with santa correct. Would like to make a nice print to give to his parents. Thanks for helping.

You have real problem here, one that is virtually unsolvable.
The areas which should be neutral, very pale grey (verging on pure white) show a distinct colour cast. Such casts are not usually too difficult to remove; the problem here is that the cast varies widely from place to place, so than when I correct one area, others still retain a cast or even get worse. The reason that the problem has occurred is that the figures are lit by several lights of widely varying colour. Finally, congrats to Farmerjim for a really noble effort; I wouldn't have expected anything so near to be possible.

GHK

RMM Loc: Suburban New York

GHK wrote:

quote=tiger1640 Being color blind does not make t... (show quote)

GHK is right, there are many light sources with different colors. Also, I have a question: Did you do any post-processing? The colors seem overly saturated.

I applied a curves adjustment, selecting Santa's hat for the white point. I then desaturated the image to get a more natural skin tone, then masked out the desaturation away from the faces, which restored the brighter colors elsewhere.