Help with color in portrait, please!

photogmomma

This shot is from my last wedding.... I am just not quite happy with the color. He seems red and she seems yellow, although that could be their normal skin tones (as I seem to remember). I just wanted to see if it's just me or if something could be done to improve the overall color.

Thanks so much!

jeffreaux2

White balance.....
as far as I can tell was spot on. I played around with it a bit in PSE which has the adjust for skin tones thingy. I think it is what it is unless you want to introduce a color cast. It didn't look too bad as a black and white. Also just desaturating a tad looked pleasing. I think that you have their natural skin tones, and it probably wouldn't be so obvious that they are red and yellow if they werent both wearing white, and the background is fairly dark. Kinda highlights the color. I would go B&W or sepia.

Shane422

I would probably reduce the red in the guy a bit using an adjustment layer and a mask. I know I would want to appear that red even if it were true.

photogmomma

jeffreaux2 wrote:

as far as I can tell was spot on. I played around with it a bit in PSE which has the adjust for skin tones thingy. I think it is what it is unless you want to introduce a color cast. It didn't look too bad as a black and white. Also just desaturating a tad looked pleasing. I think that you have their natural skin tones, and it probably wouldn't be so obvious that they are red and yellow if they werent both wearing white, and the background is fairly dark. Kinda highlights the color. I would go B&W or sepia.

Thanks so much, Jeff! She just ordered this photo in color. (I had it on my site in B&W, but she wanted color.)

I'll try doing a *slight* desaturation, but it's kind of cool to hear that my white balance was right! (Something I've been VERY bad about for a LONG time.)

Thanks so much for the help!

manta1900

Real Color?
IMHO it should look like that

JimFuglestad

Hi!

Wow... cool... Crested Butte. I lived in Gunnison for a summer and loved driving up to Crested Butte. Love that valley!

Anyway... it looks like there is an overall slight yellow overcast to the image. I removed that by doing a slight color balance correction. I'm not sure, but I'd guess this was shot with a higher ISO? Colors get harder to control with high ISO's, but they often can be corrected by doing just a global desaturation of the image.

Is this better?

Scotty_R

Jim 's correction is very good. This sort of issue always bothers me a bit--after all, people's skin tones are the color they are, and when you have two people so close together in the same image it's often difficult to decide who's the worst off. Correct one and the other looks odd, desaturate too much and they both get strange looking. I always run into this problem when I'm shooting dances--especially father/daughter dances where dad has two daughters. Dad's skin tones are too red and ruddy, but the daughters each have different skin tones in their faces because they're different ages or they are wearing different makeup. So when I think about the two images sitting on the mantle together, framed, I worry about which one will look the oddest.

Sorry to ramble on here, Momma, but you raise a point that is often very difficult to work with and I'm glad to know that there are other people in the world that are made crazy by the problem .