Alisha Robertson of AGR Photography, a phenomenal newborn photographer, and occasional guest blogger here, recently attended the MCP Color Fixing Workshop. Her work is outstanding but she knew that occasionally she would have an off shot that needed color work. After attending the online group training, here is what she had to say…

So normally my images straight out of camera are not this bad. BUT… occasionally it happens. Most of the time I toss them and go to something better but I could not toss this shot. It was sharp enough and I loved it so much. So I started working on it and was getting nothing I liked. A few weeks ago I too Jodi’s (MCP Actions) color correction class online and at the time I didn’t think I would need the tools she taught me but I tell you, it has saved so many images I would have tossed.

With this image I started in RAW and really pulled the WB blue / yellow down to blue, which made it pink so then I pulled the magenta/ green back to green. I stopped just before I started seeing green. At this point it still wasn’t perfect but I could see a good color image appearing.

Then I went to Photoshop and started using masks and some of the tricks Jodi taught me. I used a saturation layer to make the background white again (it had picked up the green in the RAW adjustment) and used a brightness contrast layer to brighten it. I then used another saturation layer to get rid of some bright red spots in the creases. I just inverted the mask and painted back over the red spots to do this.

I then fixed some spots on his face and ran portraiture at a low opacity. The end result while not PERFECT is definitely something I feel comfortable showing my client. While this is not something that I would want to do for every image when you get that one that you think is just awesome and don’t want to toss it is invaluable to know how to manipulate RAW and JPEG images. I want to add that I could not have done this if I had been shooting JPEG. I tried and it just would not correct in a JPEG format. I had to do the big adustments in RAW and then tweak in PS. Just one more reason I love RAW.

And if you really want to learn how to do this type of color correction go and take Jodi’s class. Well worth the money!!!

I shot this at ISO 1000, 2.0 and 1/200

And why you ask is the color so bad? Because it was a rainy day and I was TOO lazy to pull out my light. So I was trying to push the camera to use the small amount of light I had. Probably not smart.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Guest Bloggers, Photoshop Actions, Photoshop Tips & Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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