Help with color (please!)

kmh

I am new here and this is the first time I've posted pictures...

This picture is from a shoot last weekend, and this was the only good one of the three of them (the 2 year old wouldn't sit down!). The parents want to use it for their Christmas card. I took it with natural light and had my WB set at Auto. The picture was very yellow, so I've been playing with it in Lightroom and Photoshop. I'm wondering which one looks better, or if there's something else I should be doing? The yellower one shows the brown chair more accurately but still looks too yellow on their faces to me.

Thanks for any suggestions!

-Kate

kmh

Here is the other one.

pathfinder

You say you shot in Auto WB, but the image was quite yellow.

You said you used 'Natural light'.

Was the 'Natural Light' daylight or Tungsten?? Tungsten perhaps, or a very late afternoon sunbeam?

Were these shot in RAW, or ( unfortunately ) as incamera jpgs??

The second image is too blue. Both images are out of focus.

The color of the skin tones in the first image is not too bad - the CYK values are reasonable. The little girl on the left was probably underexposed being in the shadow. The image suffers from lack of contrast and a good white point. I did not change the color balance, but increased the contrast with a little steeper curve in RGB to increase the contrast and get brighter whites and got this....

kmh

Thank you for your suggestion, pathfinder. I went back and worked on the original. You're right, the second one is clearly too blue.

I do portraits occasionally for friends and this was the first time I had ever done them indoors (50mm 1.8). Light was late afternoon sun coming in windows to the left and behind, and the overhead light was on in the room. I had the aperture set at 1.8, ISO 800 and shutter speed 1/125. So lots of reasons to be blurry and grainy! Thankfully I got some nice individual shots of each of them outside.

These were shot in RAW.

David_S85

You have a mixed light situation here. These are tough since the proper WB for the window area light is much different than the interior lighting WB.

kmh

Oh yeah (duh!), the walls in the room were painted yellow. No wonder...

manta1900

I think it's about here (balancing both white balances).