My attempt at color adjustment

Basically, this chapter is all about color. So many of the example pictures are landscape and, as a scrapbooker, I don't really take pictures other than of people. I also don't want to use a picture from my psych lab because those don't really require color adjustments. So, I found a picture in need of help (not coincidentally because I was not the photographer) and worked what little magic I could.


After a slew of information about adjusting black and white photographs, this chapter moves into levels in color, something with which I had never previously worked. The book suggested using auto color, but with some minor tweaks. So I first just did a straight auto color from the image pull down and the adjustment display to see what would be changed. It's a slight improvement, but could be much better.



I erased it from the history palette and opened up auto color options. I selected Find Dark & Light Colors, Snap Neutral Midtones, and changed the clip percentage to .5 % as opposed to .1%.













Then I did a quick fix on the red eye and teeth, because you don't want any of that. For that I just used the red eye tool with a little bit of cloning for areas that looked to white. For the teeth, I just traced around the teeth, opened hue/saturation, changed to yellow channel, decreased saturation, and increased lightness so long as it looked natural.






Then I decided to tackle the overbearing redness in our skin tone. I opened up hue/saturation and turned the red channel all the way up to 180. This pretty much resulted in what I had suspected that the skin tones were the concentration of the red. I altered the hue of red to +5 and the lightness to +13. This worked for the skin, but I didn't like how it dulled out the shirt and purse strap of the middle female.







I traced the outline of her shirt and deleted that area from the hue/saturation layer that altered the red. You notice it most in this small picture in the leather strap.











Then I saw that the middle female still had some remaining red around her collar. So, I used the healing brush on lighten with a grab from a less red area of her chest and reduced the redness. I also noticed that the whole picture still seemed really dark. So I added a new layer copy on screen and reduced the opacity to 25%, the level at which I thought we were sufficiently light without being washed out.






Now I know that cropping is in order, as the picture is not centered. Their heads are almost cut off and mine is no where near the top. I am open to suggestions on this, but this is how I cropped it. I have a feeling it could be better.









And just to refresh your memory and put them side by side....




Before and After


Thoughts?