This 'should' be an easy fix, but........

[sjm]

it's driving me crazy. The extreme shadow on the man's face and the extreme light on the baby's face are making it difficult for me to make the whole pic look right.

the blue at the bottom is the actual color of the shirt and the baby's shorts are the red color.

any suggestions on how to proceed?

THANKS!

[sjm]

photo

[Ed_L]

This is only getting closer, but I used auto color, a 1 second fix.

Ed

[CJ Swartz]

Add a contrast mask to reduce the contrast between the washed out highlights and the dark shadows contrast masking tutorial , and then apply Levels or Curves. I don't think the shirt will show a deep cyan coloring without adding the color in another step -- the flash has lightened it and the color appears lighter than your sample.


P. S. Fixing the color cast is easy enough, but the lighting problems take extra work. You can try burning the child's 'blown-out' hair and then desaturate the resulting yellow-orange color so that you just get a hint of yellow-brown, but get to see the hair. I tried fixing the Red channel with Calculations and the Channel Mixer, but didn't get any results that I liked. The CMYK version has really ugly channels, and the LAB version's Lightness channel is as blown out as the Red channel. I do like having some shadows on the father's face -- adds dimension. There is some detail left in the child's hair -- it just takes work to make it appear.