Babies in hats

13579dk

Hey everyone - For the first time I took some photos for people other than friends and family, and wanted to get some feedback on the processing (these were just for fun/free of charge, but I'd still like to get the most out of these). There are a bunch, but I'm attaching a couple representative ones.

The issues that would benefit from some fresh pairs of eyes are, specifically:

1) These were processed on a bright, brand new, beautiful, but uncalibrated iMac screen, where I'm happy with how they look. When I check them out on my older laptop, however, they lose some pop, and maybe have some weird color casts in the skin especially; I'm not sure which I should believe. Also, any way to tell how these would be translated into prints?

2) Skin tones -- good? Bad? Comments/suggestions? Playing with the white balance sliders in ACR on photo after photo tends to skew my perception of how things should actually look. So any advice here is appreciated.

Any other comments are more than welcome - exposure (boosted pretty heavily in ACR), color, contrast, etc., fire away. My goal is for the parents to be happy with these, with an eye towards making prints. Thanks!

13579dk

and #2:

Qarik

#1: skin tone seems to be a weeee bit on the pink side on my uncalibrated monitor. but more importantly the hat dominates the shot. It is very bright and very orange. The face I think is 1/3 to 1/2 stop undexposed.

#2 there is a definite blue cast from the blanket and maybe the sky as well. the face is also underexposed.

Is the mac monitor HW calibrated?

13579dk

Qarik wrote: »

#1: skin tone seems to be a weeee bit on the pink side on my uncalibrated monitor. but more importantly the hat dominates the shot. It is very bright and very orange. The face I think is 1/3 to 1/2 stop undexposed.

#2 there is a definite blue cast from the blanket and maybe the sky as well. the face is also underexposed.

Is the mac monitor HW calibrated?

Thanks for the reply -

Yeah, I kind of got that feeling too about underexposure of the faces. (And actually it's funny you mention the hat - these are made by a friend, and the primary purpose of these photos is for displaying the hats on her website.) And I can see the blue cast now in the second one -- amazing what your eyes tell you when you stare at something long enough.

I've never calibrated the monitor, unfortunately.

Any tips for correctly exposing the faces? Go back to ACR? Tweak it with a levels adjustment layer/mask in Photoshop?

13579dk

#2, v. 2 (levels, warming filter, curves) -- moving in the right direction?

Qarik

it has improved for sure! but a tad overexposed now to my taste haha.