All photos have a red tone

<p>The skin tones in my photos are very red, backgrounds have a pink hue..overall there is a lot of red in my photos. Is this because my white balance is off in my camera or am I not matching up speed and light? I am posting a photo I haven't adjusted, it's just a snapshot but it has a good example of what I'm talking about. The walls should be tan, the kids aren't overheated and the lighting is fluorescent plus the pop-up flash which I turn down a bit as I find it's way too bright, maybe that's my downfall.<br /> Thank you for any help you can provide!</p>

<p>Photo</p>

<p>Showing my forum ineptitude.</p><div></div>

<p>Looks like you have a combination of flash and existing room light, most likely fluorescent. There are a couple of ways to handle this. Easiest probably is to turn off the flash and set your WB for whatever the room light is -- fluorescent if it is fluorescent lighting or tungsten (aka "indoor" or a symbol of a light bulb, or around 3200K, depending on what WB options your camera gives you) if it is regular light bulbs. If you're not sure what the light source is or there's a mix or regular bulbs and fluorescent, do a manual WB where you point the camera at a sheet of white paper filling up the frame and take a shot. You'll have to see your camera manual for details on this approach. If the existing light is daylight coming through a window (doesn't appear to be the case in this example) you can set the WB for either daylight or flash (both are actually about the same). If you want to combine flash and room light, you need to put a filter gel over the flash -- CTO for regular tungsten light bulbs, CTF for fluorescent.</p>

<p>You need more control over use of the flash, but with only popup flash you cannot do much more.<br>

<br />Get a flash that fits into your camera hot shoe, and rotates and tilts, as well as accepts colored filters. Best if the flash system is compatible with your camera. That is if that is possible for your camera ?</p>

<p>If you're going to use flash, then don't turn it down. The pop-up flash is not really powerful enough to overcome the ambient light in a room like that. It's just not meant for that kind of photography. What you end up with is a camera colour-balanced for flash, but a picture in which much of the lighting is not flash. That equals colours like those you got.</p>

<p>If you're going to do that regularly and you care about the colours, you'll need a bigger flash, and you may still need to put a coloured gel in front of it (it's just like a filter) so the colour from the flash matches the colour of the light in the room. That way, you match the white balance of the camera to that of the room rather than the flash. You might still get a colour cast of some sort, because exactly matching the temperature of fluorescent lighting can be tricky.</p>

<p>Craig and Frank's comments are right on the mark. The only thing I might add is to be careful where you place the sheet of white paper to do the manual white balance for the no-flash case. Since the lighting varies a bit from one part of the group to another, about the best you can do is set the manual WB for the center of the group. In addition, I would adjust your camera (if possible) for a slight bit less color saturation.</p>

<p>That being said, as you are becoming more experienced as a photographer, you are undoubtedly also becoming more sensitive to technical problems in photos, so that expecting existing illumination to provide good light for photography will likely become more of an exercise in frustration. The three usual ways around this is:</p>

<p>(a) live with the limitations of existing light, at least for snapshots;</p>

<p>(b) overpower the existing light with well characterized light that you add - the suggestions for bounced, gelled flash are in this direction; or,</p>

<p>© become both good and fast at post processing tasks such as color correction for mixed lighting.</p>

<p>Towards that end, below are a series of tweaked versions of your image to show what one can do fairly quickly in post processing. I happened to use the full version of Photoshop CS5, but you could likely use most any reasonably advanced image editing program such as Lightroom 3.5. I took your image through two steps. The first step was "ACR", and then I took the image into the main part of PS. Since I made so many minor tweaks in ACR, if it helps, I'll be happy to send you the ACR settings that I used as a file that you can use yourself.</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p>PS - BTW, I really don't think the walls are tan, at least if you could view them in sunlight. I could only obtain a decent color balance if they came out quite neutral and relatively bright. They seem about as neutral as the floor, which I also doubt is tan.</p>

<p>First, your image without changes, except for resizing it so that if displays in-line in these forums.</p><div></div>

<p>Most of the adjustments were done in ACR.</p><div></div>

<p>...and then the finer adjustments. BTW, I could have corrected the slight vignetting at the corners of your photo in ACR, but forgot to do so, so I made the correction in PS, instead.</p>

<p>Let me know if a copy of the "sidecar" file (which would give you the ACR adjustments) would be of help to you.</p>

<p>Cheers,</p>

<p>Tom M</p><div></div>

<p>PS - When I mentioned that I didn't feel the walls and floor were "tan", I meant that they were not an unambiguous shade of "tan", like what you see if you do a Google Images search on {the color tan}. They could easily be slightly off white (ie, weakly saturated but still slightly warm).</p>

<p>I don't know how much you know about this, but it might help to separate two different issues that are in the good comments above.</p>

<p>One issue is mixed light sources. If two light sources have very different temperatures, it is hard to get a good white balance. this is why pros often put gels over their flashes. However, I think this issue is secondary, as is shown by Tom's edit of your photo.</p>

<p>The other issue is the overall white balance. Even when the light sources are mixed, you can often get a decent approximation by adjusting white balance. If you have something in the photo that is white (there is a good t-shirt in the back), you could get a first approximation by using that to set white balance, and then adjust to taste. (If you want to get a good white balance, a good neutral gray card would be better than a piece of paper, because 'white' paper comes in many hues).</p>

<p>The next step above that would be to adjust the individual color channels. I don't know whether Tom did that. How you do it depends on your software.</p>

<p>Do Boy Scouts now have mixed gender troops? Where? :?</p>

<p>More than the light is mixed here.</p>

<p>Hi Dan - Nice overview of cc for the OP. </p>

<p>With respect to what adjustments I made, FYI, using ACR, I first adjusted the overall WB based on the T-shirt of the kid near the wall. Fortunately, it wasn't blown, didn't seem to have bluish "whiteners" or any of the other problems that can arise when setting a WB based on something that may or may not be a good neutral white. </p>

<p>Once I did this and corrected contrast, tonalities, etc., I was left with a small but distinct bluish cast and some unwanted brightness in the nearest parts of the floor and on the nearest people. This is consistent with the OP's comment that she used her built-in flash, but at reduced power. I knocked back the slight blue and excess brightness using a couple of slightly warm color gradients and an adjustment brush in ACR. At this point, I moved from ACR to PS CS5. </p>

<p>After leaving ACR, the two remaining problems were a minor bit of residual vignetting and excessive red that still remained in the skin of the people. I reduced the red by quickly selecting skin tones using the "color range tool" and then increasing the cyan slider in the red channel of the "selective color" tool.</p>

<p>Now that the colors are reasonabe, and unwanted variations in lighting levels across the image have been dealt with, my final step was to make a couple of very minor tweaks to the entire image using levels and contrast. The total time involved was probably 2 or 3 minutes after her image first loaded in ACR. Fortunately, work goes extremely fast on small images like this (... otherwise, I probably wouldn't do it ;-) ).</p>

<p>At that point, I collapsed everything down to one layer, down rez'ed the tweaked image for posting on photo.net, added a tiny bit of output sharpening and posted the result.</p>

<p>I hope that clarifies what I did to her image. As usual, it takes much longer to write up the procedure than it does to actually do the work. </p>

<p>Cheers,</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

I once left filter on to purple when snapping family... LOL what fun!

 

I reduce flash intensity to -2, or use soft flash. indoor light bulbs do make faces rozy, or pink especially if using lamp shades.

<p>Thank you all for the great feedback!<br>

I will turn the flash back up, as I do realize it's the common factor in my "red" photos. I do have a flash but I never use it b/c I'm so incredibly unskilled in flash. I suppose there's only one answer to that--practice!<br>

I have a Nikon D40x, the flash is an old one I used with my Pentax K1000..a Sunpak Softlite 1600 A.<br>

I have a lot of great tips to go on from you all! I correct them all in post, but am hoping I can get to a point where I don't need to do so much! lol</p>

<p>PS. This is a Canadian Cub Scout meeting, all levels of Scouting are co-ed here. I'm pretty sure they are in the states now, too.</p>

<p>There is a feature in PhotoShop Elements 7.0 that allows you to click on a patch of skin, and it will adjust the picture to make the skin correct. It has saved me on a few occasions. </p><div></div>

<p>If you were reducing the strength of your, we think weak*, flash for the balance between ambient and flash light you could probably add a red/warm filter to your flash [ a piece of warm gel taped in place]. You would then increase the power of the flash according to the amount of light the gel was holding back.<br>

You would need to make a guess at the colour temperature of the flourescent lights. Your flash is most likely balanced for about 5500Kelvin. Since you are not photographing 'through' the gel it need not be optical quality.<br>

I think you achieved a very nice balance between ambient and flash with your shot. <br>

* I don't think it is that weak, perhaps GN 56? Better than most on-board flash. </p>

<p>Robert - I have found that one click "solutions" to a color problems almost always introduce problems elsewhere in the image, often much worse than the original. Unfortunately, your example of using the "fix skin" tool in PSE dramatically illustrates this - it gave much of the image a blue-cyan cast.</p>

<p>The easiest way to see the problem that sprung up is to look at the patch of floor tiles in the lower RH corner of the OP's image. Usually, floor tiles like these are nearly color-neutral and bright, perhaps leaning a bit to the slightly warm side of neutral. Below, I've listed the HSB coordinates of this area as read out by an 11x11 eyedropper in PS CS5:<br /><br />a) Original -> 25, 11, 63<br /><br />b) TJM's final tweak -> 38, 12, 76<br /><br />c) Robert C's tweak -> 210, 32, 74</p>

<p>If you look at these numbers, you will see that the major effect of my tweaks was simply to brighten up this area a bit (ie, 63 to 76), but I kept the saturation almost exactly the same, and slightly moved the hue from a red-orange (25) to more of a mid-orange (38).</p>

<p>In contrast, PSE's one-click skin fix moved the hue completely around the color wheel to 210 (cyan-blue) and tripled the saturation (! ! ! ). These are just crazy numbers for a patch of almost neutral floor tiles. The one thing that PSE's one-click solution did get right was to brighten it up about the same amount as I felt appropriate.</p>

<p>My approach to color correction is almost always as I described above -- start the process by first fixing any major problems with the overall brightness and contrast in the image, then make image-wide adjustments to the color. If the color adjustments are large, they may throw off the brightness and contrast a bit, so you might need to go back and tweak these. Only AFTER the image has nice overall brightness, contrast and color, will I then work on the skin. Making the skin corrections after overall corrections, I never have to go back and make anymore overall adjustments. In contrast, if I start by adjusting the skin using a one-click "solution", I always have to go back fix the havoc it has caused. About the only time I'll vary this routine is if a large fraction of the image is occupied by skin and the background is relatively unimportant (eg, a headshot of a single person). Then, I may start the cc process by working on the skin first.</p>

<p>It goes without saying that if one attempts to tweak images using a non-color managed system that has not been recently profiled, ie, probably 95% of all desktop machines and 99% of all laptops, all bets are off. On such a machine, you might get an image to look absolutely wonderful, but when viewed on other machines, it may look absolutely hideous, won't print well, etc.</p>

<p>HTH,</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p>PS - BTW, even relatively expensive commercial color correction plugins that advertise themselves as semi-automatic (eg, onOne Software's "Skin Tune" / "Photo Tune") make the corrections in the order I stated: tonalities first, overall color next, then skin color as the final step.</p>

<p>PPS - Another area that shows the bad side effects of using PSE "Skin Fix" is the jeans. Most of the jeans are nearly at 100% saturation after the fix, but they are not close to this in the real world (or in my tweaked version).</p>