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exagerated reds


craig_makela

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<p>Hi,<br>

I recently picked up a D90 to get some good shots of my daughters school Christmas concert. All of the children were wearing red, and many of the lights were also red. Each picture I took seemed to really exagerate the reds. Using a flash helped, but I wanted some 'natural' looking shots of the environment. Was there anything that I could have done about this? Is there a white balance setting that could've helped in this situation?<br>

Thanks</p><div>00VEto-200127584.jpg.36081b5aa7294287df43f03e6b1b3574.jpg</div>

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<p>If you shoot in RAW, you can adjust for white balance after the fact, to you heart's content, without losing any quality whatsoever. You can also desaturate those reds, a bit, and easily settle them down. But even with a JPG, you've got some hope.<br /><br />Here's a 10 second job ... minor color temp adjustment (cooling things down), some desaturation of the reds, and then a touch of noise reduction and adaptive sharpening on her face.</p><div>00VEup-200137584.jpg.9253dccd07a32748367de54c03358abb.jpg</div>
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<p>The usual rule of thumb is to shoot raw to preserve as much wiggle room as possible for adjustments later, including selecting the best color space. This is really helpful with tricky stuff like stage lighting. But sometimes I prefer to shoot straight to JPEG for casual stuff, so I don't follow that advice very faithfully.</p>

<p>I tend toward the unhip use of brushes for selective desaturation and confining adjustment to hue, etc., to specific areas. These tools - hue to target, lightness to target, hue replacer, etc. - are usually available in most full featured photo editing programs, including the low end stuff like Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro and others, but are seldom recommended in current tutorials. They're fairly quick and easy to use, normally by something like right clicking on the bit you want to correct and left clicking to select what you'd like to correct it to. These brushes are fairly selective and don't require use of masks, layers, etc., so they're fairly efficient even for retouching numerous photos in a session.</p>

<p>Not much to work with here, being from a screen capture of your sample photo, but here's about 30 seconds worth of a desaturation brush over the reds and hue to target over the white areas to minimize the yellows.</p><div>00VEzL-200191584.jpg.eda4bd7725d18d3662b5710ac14fb7cd.jpg</div>

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