White balance, skin tone, and certain light conditions

SimonMW

As I mentioned in another thread my background is in video. I'm new to digital photography.

I've been reading a lot of threads about skin tone, and the subject of white balance comes up a lot. This subject interests me a lot as getting good skin tone seems to be a bit of a black art!

I have a number of photos taken at a barbeque recently. It was late afternoon/early evening so there is a nice warm tone to the pictures. In video I rarely ever white balance the camera unless I am in a mixed or unusual lighting situation because white balancing works by taking away colour. In a warm early evening situation or sunset the last thing in the world I would do is to white balance. Because that would take away the very warm hues that I am after.

So my question is really about how I can judge and colour correct skin tone for printing under such lighting without making people look like they have been on an Australian beach for several hours? I'm not even sure how much adjustment my photos need. I've posted some uncorrected ones here. The second one I would like to correct as it was very underexposed a lot and I am having difficulty bringing it back and getting the colours right.

SimonMW

Here are some quick corrections I did using Silkypix. Any comments appreciated.




The one with her grandad is more problematic. Correcting the skin tones of Daisy (the baby!) throws Bill's skin right out. Correcting for Bills skin makes everything look like a cold winters day. Is there any way I can correct all of this in Silkypix, or do I need to fork out for Photoshop CS3 for the ability to perform 16-bit layer compositing?

claudermilk

The corrections you've done so far look good to me. The problematic picture is ecause of the differing lighting (he is lit directly by the evening sun, the baby is only getting indirect. His lighting is very warm from the sun, the baby is very blue since it's all reflected from the sky). Really, doing the correction in layers is the only way I can think of. Either PS or possibly LightZone.