Home again...

So, I'm home again with this stomach crud. I'm bored and I really don't want to lay in bed all day. So, I'm here. At my computer. Sitting in my comfy desk chair. Browsing, checking my email, checking out my facebook, and typing away. I don't get this much. Nice, long quiet time at my computer. Usually I'm in between doing things...making dinner....bath time for kids....agreeing to strange requests from my three year old. This is just quiet. Do you hear that? Click...clack...click...clack. Just typing. Isn't it nice?

Oh, by the way..Happy St. Patrick's Day. I'm not Irish. I'm not wearing green. But I thought I'd be nice and wish you a happy one just in case you were.

So, besides internet adventures, I've been working on a photo from yesterday that I took of the girlie. I mostly shoot in full auto. I haven't begun to be that adventurous yet. Well, at least I tried some other modes yesterday to no avail. Most of the pictures I took were too blue. I don't mean depressing, but literally blue.

Here's one that I absolutely love. Her eyes are just absolutely wonderful in it. But again, it is just too blue. I also needed to crop out Scott from the picture, but that's the easy part. Go ahead and click on the picture. See what I mean about the eyes?


Alright, so this photo is definitely in need of some post-processing. I took it to Paint Shop Pro 8 and started some magic. First I tried Automatic Color Balance. Here's the result:

Not bad. But it still lacked warmth. By the way, in Automatic Color Balance, there is one bar to slide left and right for the illuminant temperature. You can also adjust the strength as well. From the far left, it looks very orange to the far right where it looks very blue. Just slide around until your pictures looks right. Great for an easy fix, but if your picture has some serious color issues, like mine, then Color Balance is better.

In PSP8's Color Balance (I'm not sure if it is the same for Photoshop), you have three bars to adjust called Color Levels and three areas to work on: Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights. I hope you're still with me.

Here are the Color Levels: Cyan to Red, Magenta to Green, and Yellow to Blue.

For Midtones and highlights, I adjusted all three color levels. More Red than Cyan, more greent than magenta, and more yellow than blue. In fact my numbers were: 57, 26, -35.

After getting the color just right, I sharpened the eyes to make them "pop", fixed a few blemishes and voila!


Here is the original side-by-side with my final fix:

What do you think? To yellow? Not enough pink? Did I go overboard? Or is it just right?