Advice

[sydneysnana]

I was using my new Rebel this morning. Can someone tell me why Ava's skin tone is so pink/red? I know whe has some, but this seems a little extreme. Was I reflecting off the blanket??

Oh and how do I best correct/tone down that??

Thanks
michelle

http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/1imjeH4aWH8IDhRtGLds9bsFTRNa_thumb.jpg (http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1imjeH4aWH8IDhRtGLds9bsFTRNa)

http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/1OsvQDSLBhCOHvHnibURPCsjJgnfN_thumb.jpg (http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1OsvQDSLBhCOHvHnibURPCsjJgnfN)

[ljameso1]

Reflection is one possibility. Another is the white balance wasn't set for the lighting source. Use correct for skin tone under enhance>adjust color>adjust color for skin tone to make less noticeable.

[sydneysnana]

I was using Auto, so I don't think I can set the white balance. Maybe I better ventrue into the other modes becasue I take alot of indoor pics of my grand-daughters.
Thanks for the help
Michelle

[Not4wood]

I was using Auto, so I don't think I can set the white balance. Maybe I better ventrue into the other modes becasue I take alot of indoor pics of my grand-daughters.
Thanks for the help
Michelle

Depending on your camera of course, you can shoot in the Raw mode and when you open the shot you can then Edit the White Balance and make corrections there even before you open your editing progam like Elements.

[TonyW]

Not sure what version of Elements you have but if you have PSE5 or PSE6 and have updated the Camera Raw plug-in you can use Open As and select Camera RAW in the dropdown and the jpeg will open in Camera Raw. You can then use the Temperature and Tone sliders to adjust until it looks right. Works very well on this image - there are temperature and tone sliders in Quick Fix but they are very coarse adjustments and the temperature and tint sliders in Camera Raw work much better.

Tony

[lexcell]

I think Linda nailed it as likely likely a combination of reflection off the blanket and white balance.

As both Mark and Tony mentioned, you can adjust this after the fact...if you shoot RAW you have the ability to tweak the RAW file in Camera RAW. If you shot jpeg, you can do as Tony suggests but, be sure to save the resulting file as a tiff so that you are not further compressing the file when you save it.

If you are shooting in the fully automatic mode on the camera your override selections are a bit limited. If you shoot in the creative modes P,AV,TV,M you have the ability to shoot in RAW and tweak the file later if necessary while still retaining the detail and information you captured in the beginning.

It depends on how large you make your images, what your end use is and how much work you want to do later in post processing.

[sydneysnana]

Thanks, this is great. I've been wondering about the advantage to me to use Raw and thought I'd wait on that, but it sounds like I need to go there sooner than later....Maybe even today.

"If you shot jpeg, you can do as Tony suggests but, be sure to save the resulting file as a tiff so that you are not further compressing the file when you save it" Can you explain this more? I've always shot in JPEG and saved in JPEG. I remember multiple editing on a JPEG is not good, but I would like to learn more on the tiff.

Thanks AGAIN
Michelle

[lexcell]

Michelle,
If you open a jpeg image and work on it then save it as a jpeg again, the file is compressed. Each time you do this, the file will become compressed even more resulting in less image quality. It is likely that if you only do it once or twice and don't make large prints, you may not see the resulting loss of quality but, if you do it often to the same file you will see a degradation in the image quality.
What happens is each time you save a jpeg file Photoshop compresses the file to keep it small and throws data away. You have no control over what and how much data is thrown away.
If you save your files as tiffs and work in layers (which allow you to tweak the adjustments later) your files will hold up better but, will also increase in size.
It's a trade off...you need to decide how much you work an image and how often you save it along with what your final use will be. Moving to RAW will create more work for you but, will give you higher resolution images to work with.

[TonyW]

Laurie: I think actually it's not a problem when you open a jpeg file in Camera Raw. If you edit it in Camera Raw and then don't save it, it keeps the edits separately so next time you open the jpeg file it opens in Camera Raw and applies the edits. So I don't think the jpeg ever gets degraded unless you save it under another name or over-write the original.

I could be wrong though :)

I'm continually surprised how much you can do with jpegs in Camera Raw and how much extra detail is in the jpegs that Camera Raw can extract. Not quite the full tone range of RAW but pretty good especially if you shoot jpeg fine. I've even gone back to jpeg images shot with older cameras I've owned that didn't have Raw (or ones I had that had Raw but it was such a pain to use that I didn't) and got some amazing improvements over what I was able to do back when I shot them.

As you can tell I'm a big Camera Raw fan :D - and I want the full featured one - just can't decide whether I upgrade my CS2 to CS3 or get Lightroom or maybe I'll have to get both. I do have Nikon Capture NX which has some interesting features but I find it rather sluggish and a bit frustrating to use.

Tony

[Not4wood]

I went back to your image to spend more time on it, and I dont see any overly red/pink on her. Babies are normally on the red/pink side anyway but on my Calibrated Color Monitor I don't anything that I would correct for. Just my two $ Looks perfect the way I sees its....;)

[lexcell]

Tony,
I believe you are correct about using jpegs (or tiffs for that matter) in Camera RAW. I was thinking of working jpegs in Elements or CS3 not Camera RAW but that is an excellent suggestion.