Need you help with this one folks .

manny212

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Ok my neighbor wanted some pics of his 16 year old daughter . I have seen her grow up as baby so it really was my pleasure .

My question to you all , is my color off here ? I'm trying to get this right but am having a hard time figuring it out . Sometimes I oversaturate , sometimes don't enough .

on this I tried the least , or what i thought was the least . Someone with better eyes than myself please chime in. Thanks .



Cristina o-295 by mannyher1, on Flickr
 
Unless we know what color she is we can't really answer that accurately. The color I am seeing is credible, I believe it, though.

Nice photo.
 
Unless we know what color she is we can't really answer that accurately. The color I am seeing is credible, I believe it, though.

Nice photo.[/QUOTE

Thanks ! , she is white HAHA , I'm thinking it might be lacking some punch , but every time I try to "punch" it up , I tend to go overboard .
 
Every shoot should start with either a customized white balance, or a frame of a calibrated white balance target. I use the X-Rite Colour Checker Passport as it not only allows me to get dead-on WB, but to warm or cool the image by incremented amounts. Once you have the WB and exposure nailed, then you can carefully and selectively adjust saturation, colour balance, etc to get the 'pop' you desire. FWIW, the skin looks reasonable to me, but I would suggest a different crop; to me that looks like it should be a square image.
 
I like that image and even on my crappy monitor it looks good to me.
 
Color is subjective. This is a look. Whether it's good is up to you and the client. I don't see anything that rings as untrue except maybe her skin is just 1% too orange.
 
Her skin looks great. So don't touch her. If you use LR then take your adjustment brush and go in and add some contrast and a little bit of saturation to everything but her. I would also crop in to the rule of thirds so she is not so centered. Great shot.
 
With people, one way to detect any color casts is to sample the whites of a persons eyes.

Using Camera Raw(ACR)'s White Balance eye dropper to sample her eye whites I see that the RGB values are all very close meaning there is no color cast.
However, clicking the White Balance eye dropper on the same place reduces the Temperature and the Tint somewhat indicating the image is a bit warm.
Being somewhat warm is OK for a people photo.

However, the color in the image looks to be somewhat de-saturated. So you could use the ACR image Presence sliders to add some Clarity and Vibrance to suit your taste.

She is well separated from the background relative to focus, but not from a light ratio perspective.
The blurred background is very busy and the lens used delivers a blur quality (bokeh) that is well less than 'creamy', and in fact has kind of a jittery, nervous look to it that kind of steals attention from her.



So in addition to using ACR's Presence controls, in Photoshop I added a neutral gradient to the background, and a mid-tone contrast adjustment to just her.
I used the Patch tool on the dark areas under eyes to lighten them up a bit.
I cropped a bit off the top and right sides and added a narrow black border.

951Edit5305353_2e4136eedc_b.jpg
 
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Yes, your colors are off. However, just slightly. I pulled the image into PhotoShop and darkened it a little... everything started to come alive. The grass looked a little yellow so I added a few points of blue. I still wanted to see more green in the greens so I removed some red. I don't like what previous folks did (with all due respect) I don't think you should lose all that softness..... and turn her into a model... she's very beautiful without it.

$woman_on_grass.jpg

Having seen it on the screen, it looks a little green... but you get the idea...

Lenny
 
I don't mean what race she is ;)

I mean what color she is! Skin tones even within quite narrow racial groups vary surprisingly widely.
 
Somehow, it looks slightly off to me. But I can't put my finger on what it is. I like someone's idea of using a color target in a first frame, particularly with tone-reliant images like portraits.
 
$grasslady.jpg

I like this better BW
 
Hey folks thank you all for all the great info and advise ! I'm ging back and having a second look at all my edits of this shoot to see what I might do better .

Im the mean time I have this one . I have cropped it a bit, since I did not like the way her arms were placed . Question, Is that flare really , really annoying ?
I dont know wether to like it or not , haha . Just struggling with this test . Thanks again for all the help on previous pic.


Cristina o-476 by mannyher1, on Flickr
 
As for my impression, I think the color is fine in the OP photo, but now I would like to comment on the second photograph.

I think this girl's portrait would benefit from some overall skin-balancing due to some obviously different colors in her skin.

The flare is hardly anything to be concerned about.

Her lipstick color is not the best choice.
 
Designer ,

Yea I seem to be having and issue with the colors in this test . Going to have to google the heck out of topic to get to the bottom of it . Btw I am in full agreement with the hideous lip color . !!!
 

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