Help with color correction Please?

Hi there,

I recently took a chance to photograph my friend's wedding and discovered after the facts some of the photos

turned out to be red like cherry. Now, I have some experience in Photoshop and Lightroom to make minor color

correction but I have not been able to correct this one. Please suggest me how I should correct this photo using

either PS or Lightroom?

Send a sample.

I wanted to upload the photo but some I lost the upload screen. Now I can not upload - there is no upload option<div></div>

I did this with exactly one click in ACR. It isn't perfect, but it really isn't that difficult to get somewhere a whole lot better.<div></div>

Well, judging by your experience level a crude way of white balancing this shot in photoshop would be to use the white

eyedropper curves tool. Click it on a neutral area of the white dress.

And here is a couple more clicks. Since I don't know what the original skin tone was, it's hard to tell how far to go.<div></div>

BTW, it looks like you focused on the furniture.

I was unable to get neutral colors on the skin and walls at the same time and would therefore work on the highlights

of the dress a bit more and convert the photo to black and white later.<div></div>

Here is my try with PS CS3.

 

Process

 

1. Color Balance using the dress

 

2. Apply Photo filter Cooling 82, 12%

 

3. Creat a mask for facial area using quick mask.

 

4. Apply More Cooling filter to facial area only 12%

 

5. Reduce Flash induced Viginetting using Lens correction filter

 

6. Adjust Contrast and Brighness<div></div>

With dress some what corrected (need more time/work) via a contrast mask plus brighness curve and color reduction.<div></div>

Try adjusting the red in curves, then adjusting the whites in selective color. You'll get much better results than the above samples. In addition to get superior results, learn about using layer masks and adjustment layers. I used these methods to get the result I have posted.<div></div>

My process in PS:

 

1.Autolevels

2.Levels - bring the mid-tones up a bit

3.Hue/Saturation - hue slider to the right about 8 units to take the red into a more neutral zone

4. Duplicate layer - bring up the mids more on the background, then blend both layers using eraser. Flatten image.

5. Duplicate layer - apply diffuse glow to upper layer at around 30%. Flatten layers.

6. Add 5 units of saturation to bring back some warmth.

7. Levels - bring the highlights slider back to around 250 to bring back some detail in the dress; pull the left shadows slider in to give a bit more depth.

 

8. Save image.

 

Took me a lot longer typing than doing! My advice is that as well as aiming to improve the colour balance, never lose sight of the overall balance of tonal quality in an image. You could then set up an action to batch process a similar set of images to save you time.

 

Hope that helps.<div></div>

I don't know what the reality was, but if you want a non-professional opinion on what looks best, David Prouty is the winner by a country mile.

Here's my version. I wonder what color space it was in- it didn't look right to begin with. I flipped through spaces using "assign profile" and assigned apple RGB before converting to SRGB for editing.

 

Then I set gray point using curves and got the image in the ballpark. I finally selected the dress and desaturated it.

 

Not wonderful but a bit better I think.

Roger<div></div>

Roger's conversion looks like it's as close as you could hope for.

 

Here I opened it in RAW in CS3 and just hit it with the white point dropper then saved as a jpeg.

 

 

<img src="http://img377.imageshack.us/img377/9400/returnbp3.jpg">

This took me a little under 1 minute in Photoshop:

 

1 - Gray eyedropper in curves - selected a shadow on her dress to get my target neutral.

2 - Bumped up the RGB curve to give a little more brightness & contrast

3 - Make a hue/saturation layer - go into each individual drop-down option (each indiv. color), bring saturation way up to quickly see which pixels I'm affecting, then desaturate what shouldn't have a color cast.<div></div>

.......<div></div>

Thank you all for taking the time to help me. Now I feel comfortable to apply one of your suggestions.

Tura