Fathers Day Portrait

drdan · Jun 20, 2004

My 4 and 6 year old grandsons wanted me to take a picture of them to give to their father today. So I sat them down this morning and got this as one of the shots. This was the first one I took and had forgotten to take off my polarizer and had the settings wrong and overexposed it. The expressions were the best though so I worked with it. I really have a problem with skin tones. I should have gotten a warming filter out but these are not the sitting still kind of kids. Their parents did like the picture a lot but I know it's not what it should be. The six year old just lost another front tooth this morning. The 4 year old decided to yank it out for him.

I have already "warmed" it considerably in PS as well as a lot of other enhancement. It's still too pink and cool though. Any suggestions at this point or about skintones in portraits in general.

Not Neve · Jun 20, 2004

Dr. Dan, I really like it! What a great father's day gift!

Cute freckles on the older one and is that an earring on the 4 year old?

voodoocat · Jun 20, 2004

Used a curves layer and used the midtone dropper on a middle gray in the white shirt. Then I used the hue/saturation tool to decrease saturation in the yellows.

drdan · Jun 21, 2004

Fantastic correction, thanks!

Can you go into slightly more detail on what you did in curves and how and why you decreased just the saturation of yellow. It looked to me as if yellow was increased.

Alison · Jun 21, 2004

Great capture on those expressions! I love the edit, also. I too need to learn to work on skin tones!

terri · Jun 21, 2004

Yep, that's all that was needed here. It is a very cute portrait but had a heavy pink/magenta tones overall, not just the skin. Notice the difference in the bricks in the background, as well. Voods fixed it easily, and now you have a winner!

Very nice job of getting the little ones to cooperate and look directly into the camera, which can be the toughest thing of all sometimes!

voodoocat · Jun 21, 2004

drdan said:
Fantastic correction, thanks!

Can you go into slightly more detail on what you did in curves and how and why you decreased just the saturation of yellow. It looked to me as if yellow was increased.

Sure. The curves was easy. Like I said I used the midtone color dropper. When you load up curves, there are 3 droppers. Black, middle and white. If there is a gray tone in the photo (like the white shirt in shadow) use the midtone dropper to set the white balance by clicking on the gray area of the white shirt. That left it a little too yellow, so I used the hue/saturation tool to decrease saturation in the yellow channel.

It's not perfect but with a small compressed jpeg it's pretty tough to get spot on colors. It would be much easier with the full size original file that came from the camera.

drdan · Jun 21, 2004

Well, I figured out where the strange coloring came from. I had been taking pictures of products for my website and had forgotten to take off the white balance setting for florescent lighting. Here's one I got of a moth at lunch today. It was a pretty big moth, about 2 inches long right by my front door. I switched to cloudy day white balance and it was too yellow. I used curves midtones dropper and it got too cool so I had to warm it back up a lot to get it about normal. I took the picture at about 2 1/2 inches so even trying for increased DOF the bottom of the wings were not focused. I think I overdid sharpening the bottom of the wings with unsharp mask.

jadin · Jun 21, 2004

Ahh yes, that dastardly white balance. If you shoot in RAW mode the camera records what it sees without adjusting it for white balance. It also allows you to +/- up to 2.0 exposure settings. (at least my camera does)

You can focus down to 2 1/2 inches?? The best macro lens I was thinking of buying was 8.7 inches minimum focus depth.

drdan · Jun 21, 2004

Actually I can focus down to the object just about touching the lens. IMO 8.7 inches is not really macro. I have seen Canon and Sony cameras that focus very close, well under 2 inches. I do a lot of macro so it's important to me.