Problem:the skin color of the newborn baby

[gablau]

This issue may have come up before, but my related searches failed to give an answer.

I am an ob doctor who loves to take pictures of the babies I deliver (and give them to the parents). For years, using an old clunker, a Sony Mavica, I had no problem. With or without the flash, nice pictures, of course with all the limitations of a 1.3 MP camera. Then I got an Olympus C2500-L and I was puzzled, because all the flash pictures brought out the skintone of the newborn babies in a horrible way. As if all the capillaries would have appeared in an amplified way. I tried all settings, but I could not achieve any substantial improvement. I must state: I had no problem of any other kind, adults, children, all came out just fine. Even few month old babies were just fine, only the newborns had this weird problem. I blamed the camera and I just got a.......guess what........a Canon 20d. I took pictures of the whole family of the last baby I delivered and to my total horror, everybody looks great, except the baby, who's face is so red, as if she was boiled in hot water.

I suspect that the newborn babie's skin is very thin and the new digital cameras sense some wavelength which the old Sony camera didn't, and that causes this problem, but I really don't know.

Anyone has any suggestion? Anyone has even encountered this problem, or just I am overlooking something obvious?

Thanks,

Gabor
Ps:feel free to write to docobgyn@yahoo.com, if applicable.

[tim]

Welcome to the forum Gabor :) I'll ask a few questions then we might be able to help you out more easily.

Did you use a flash? If so, on camera or external? What lens are you using? What lighting's in the room? That's enough questions for now ;)

[gablau]

Welcome to the forum Gabor :) I'll ask a few questions then we might be able to help you out more easily.

Did you use a flash? If so, on camera or external? What lens are you using? What lighting's in the room? That's enough questions for now ;)

Thanks for responding.

I used the internal flash of the Canon 20d
The lighting in the room varied, as I tried to turn off and on the fluorescent lighting, I even took the baby near the window to have natural light. In fact, I even tried a few pictures without the flash, and I still had the similar problem.
I used two lenses, one the 50mm 1.8 Canon, the other the EFS 18-55mm Canon lens. Seriously, I don't think it is a lens issue. I failed to mention that I had the same problem with a Canon 1d which I borrowed from my son-in-law and that camera had the top of the line (literally) lenses. It is something with the skin of the newborn (and ONLY the newborn) which somehow different. I had no problems taking pictures of the same babies, a few months later (that with the Olympus, I just got the 20d)

I also tried on the 20d change a whole bunch of settings, flash brightness, exposure time, aperture, even different WB settings, I tried just about all settings on the 20d. The one and only which made a mild difference, when I set the Parameters to Set 1, where I took the Saturation to -2. But even that resulted in a picture, vastly inferior to the old clunker Sony Mavica. The rest were totally useless, all the Photoshop magic couldn't help (:-).

Interesting to note, that when I took a group picture, everybody's skin were just fine, except of course the newborn baby. If the settings or the lighting were bad (inappropriate) the entire picture should have been bad, but it wasn't.

Gabor

[tim]

Do newborn babies have thin/transparent skin? I'd not use a flash for that, i'd use the Canon 1.8 lens at whatever aperture you need to get a good shutter speed. Natural light is usually best, and auto white ballance should be ok.

Can you post one of your pics? It might help see what's going on, and maybe I can have a play in photoshop and see if I can make it better.

[PacAce]

I just had a newborn grandson a couple of months ago and I noticed the same problem. I attributed this to two things. First, the skin color of newborn babies are naturally redder than other people. In Japan, babies are referred to as akachan which translated literally mean "reddish one" in English. The second factor is that the digital cameras may be a little more sensitive to the red colors and do tend to exaggerate the reds a little more than the other colors. A way to get around this problem when takin baby pictures may be to change the Tone parameter on the 20D so that the skin tone isn't so red. But the problem with this may be that, if the baby is with other people, the skin tones of the others may tend towards the "jaundiced" side, if you know what I mean.

Actually, what I found really troubling with my grandson's pictures were the fact that the camera would exaggerate the reddish blotches on the face. Hardly noticeable when you look directly at the baby but very evident in the picture. This is probably because the flash illuminates the baby's face a lot more than when looking at it under ambient lighting. If one were to take the baby under the sunlight or strong lighting, I'm sure the reddish blotches would be just as noticeable.

I know this doesn't help you solve your problem but it may explain why you're getting the results you're getting.

BTW, I used Photoshop to "fix" my grandson's reddish face and blotches to make the face look less "objectional". :)

[J Rabin]

Gabor: I'll take a whack given I have two docs in family.
1st most impt question: Are shooting JPGs? Because of the way default in-camera jgp settings boost/enahance/jack-up saturation and contrast for amateurs, the default in-camera jpg settings have a real tendency to produce over-saturated reds. Read the documentation on "parameters" and make yourself a custom "parameter set" in the 20D that is as "neutral" as possible.
2nd. Since in-camera sRGB tends to do same as above, for the infants, switch to using AdobeRGB color space. Again, much more neutral tones.
I can't tell you exactly how to do both of these, since I shoot exclusively RAW .CR2 files, both of these artifacts are non-issues for me.
Also, go to Phototune.com website for PhotoShop color correction tool to fix existing photos.
Hope this helps. Now if they will just reduce your malpractice premiums to pay for this...

Edit. BTW, when this happens to me shooting sweaty kids doing sports, I use the "unifying skin tone" technique from Jack Davis & Ben Willmore's book entitled "How to Wow, PS for Photography." Speed, effectiveness, simplicity are the hallmarks technique. The results of this one get-red-out technique have paid for the book 100x over.

[scottbergerphoto]

1.Use the Lasso Tool in PS to make a selection around the visible parts of the baby's skin that looks too red.
2. You can add areas to your selection by holding down the CTRL key for each area as you draw with the left mouse key held down.
3.Then open up Hue/Saturation (Ctrl-U) and then select Reds from the pull down menu and dial down the red saturation to taste. When you are done, select OK.
4. If the change is too dramatic, immediately go to Edit>Fade Hue/Saturation, and dial down your change. Then OK. If you do anything else before this step it won't be available.
5.Then Ctrl-d to deselct your selection.
No charge. Professional Courtesy. ;)

[PacAce]

I found that an easier method for correct reddish skin tone is to use the Select > Color Range... tool.

1. (First image) Click on Select > Color Range... and in the Color Range window, select Reds. If there are other things that are red besides the babies face, you might want to use one of the Marquee or Lasso tools to roughly outline the babies face first to prevent the other objects from getting selected by the Color Range tool.

2. Use the Hue/Saturation adjustments tool to alter the Hue of the baby's face so that it's not so red. In my example, I exagerrated the correction so that the difference will be very noticeble in this demo. I would ordinarily only go to +10 in the Hue instead of the +15 I used here.

The advantage of this method is that you are not altering the saturation and hence retains the "richness" of the color without making it look faded.
.

[Medalta]

If you have either Photoshop or PhotoShop Elements take a moment to check out this page. About half way down there is a short tutorial I think is just what you need.

www.photoshopelementsuser.com/videotips/ (http://www.photoshopelementsuser.com/videotips/)#

I have followed his steps a few times and they work very well plus he comes up with some neat little general tips the average user may not know about.

The only problem I found was that he does everything on a Mac. :evil:
Too bad he doesn't recognize the limitations of his computer ! :lol:
He should upgrade to a real system sometime :cool:

The vid is 7+ megs

[gablau]

Do newborn babies have thin/transparent skin? I'd not use a flash for that, i'd use the Canon 1.8 lens at whatever aperture you need to get a good shutter speed. Natural light is usually best, and auto white ballance should be ok.

Can you post one of your pics? It might help see what's going on, and maybe I can have a play in photoshop and see if I can make it better.

Do newborn babies have thin/transparent skin? I'd not use a flash for that, i'd use the Canon 1.8 lens at whatever aperture you need to get a good shutter speed. Natural light is usually best, and auto white ballance should be ok.

Can you post one of your pics? It might help see what's going on, and maybe I can have a play in photoshop and see if I can make it better.

First, I would like to say thank you to everybody who is trying to help me here. What a friendly bunch. Being a very experienced "forum person", I am impressed.
---------------------------
Yes tim, the newborn babies have thin/transparent skin, that seems to be quite obvious. As for the 1.8 lens, I tried just that. The skin tone was still unacceptable (to my total shock, because that was exactly the reason I got that lens in the first place, based on the Olympus experience, I expected the same problem). In fact, the problem gets worse with the quality of the digital camera. The better the camera is, the worse the problem becomes related to newborn babies. Amazing. With my old clunker Sony Mavica I had no problem (it broke). Here are some samples (I hope I will do the attachments correctly).

First picture, old clunker, Sony Mavica:
http://www.mounet.com/~gablau/pic2.jpg
It's not a great picture, but the skin tone is basically okay.

Second picture, Olympus Camedia D-2500L:
http://www.mounet.com/~gablau/pic4.jpg

On this you can already notice the large red blotches. It is a different baby, but I carefully chose representative of the problem.

Third picture:
http://www.mounet.com/~gablau/pic5.jpg

This is the Canon 20d. The entire surface of the facial skin is all wrong.

Gabor

[gablau]

I just had a newborn grandson a couple of months ago and I noticed the same problem.

I am glad I am not alone (:-).

I attributed this to two things. First, the skin color of newborn babies are naturally redder than other people. In Japan, babies are referred to as akachan which translated literally mean "reddish one" in English. The second factor is that the digital cameras may be a little more sensitive to the red colors and do tend to exaggerate the reds a little more than the other colors.

That is exactly what I am suspecting. The early CCDs weren't this sensitive, thus less problem with the newborn babies.

A way to get around this problem when takin baby pictures may be to change the Tone parameter on the 20D so that the skin tone isn't so red.

Yes. In fact, the only tolerable picture with the 20d came out of setting the Tone and the Saturation parameters. Still, not nearly as good as it should be.

Actually, what I found really troubling with my grandson's pictures were the fact that the camera would exaggerate the reddish blotches on the face. Hardly noticeable when you look directly at the baby but very evident in the picture.

That's the problem! Exactly. See my sample pictures to tim above (links).

BTW, I used Photoshop to "fix" my grandson's reddish face and blotches to make the face look less "objectional". :)

I love Photoshop, and the blotches only were fixable. But when the entire skin surface is messed up, it is hard to make a correction, resulting in normal skin tones. At least, I couldn't (:-).

Gabor

[gablau]

Gabor: I'll take a whack given I have two docs in family.
1st most impt question: Are shooting JPGs? Because of the way default in-camera jgp settings boost/enahance/jack-up saturation and contrast for amateurs, the default in-camera jpg settings have a real tendency to produce over-saturated reds. Read the documentation on "parameters" and make yourself a custom "parameter set" in the 20D that is as "neutral" as possible.
2nd. Since in-camera sRGB tends to do same as above, for the infants, switch to using AdobeRGB color space. Again, much more neutral tones.

I will give a try on these ones. Thanks for the suggestions.

I can't tell you exactly how to do both of these, since I shoot exclusively RAW .CR2 files, both of these artifacts are non-issues for me.

I will try that too, although I never worked with RAWs.

Also, go to Phototune.com website for PhotoShop color correction tool to fix existing photos. Hope this helps. Now if they will just reduce your malpractice premiums to pay for this...

Hehehe....yeah, right. I am doing this for years, and I haven't got a penny out of it, other than the satisfaction of love of babies and photography.

Edit. BTW, when this happens to me shooting sweaty kids doing sports, I use the "unifying skin tone" technique from Jack Davis & Ben Willmore's book entitled "How to Wow, PS for Photography." Speed, effectiveness, simplicity are the hallmarks technique. The results of this one get-red-out technique have paid for the book 100x over.

Will try that too.
Thanks again.

Gabor

[gablau]

1.Use the Lasso Tool in PS to make a selection around the visible parts of the baby's skin that looks too red.
2. You can add areas to your selection by holding down the CTRL key for each area as you draw with the left mouse key held down.
3.Then open up Hue/Saturation (Ctrl-U) and then select Reds from the pull down menu and dial down the red saturation to taste. When you are done, select OK.
4. If the change is too dramatic, immediately go to Edit>Fade Hue/Saturation, and dial down your change. Then OK. If you do anything else before this step it won't be available.
5.Then Ctrl-d to deselct your selection.
No charge. Professional Courtesy. ;)

Thanks. But I am still trying to figure out how to fix the problem before I take the picture. Photoshop only can do so much. I tried the above, resulting less red, but still very unnatural skin tones.

Gabor

[gablau]

Anyone has a suggestion about perhaps using a real filter (not Photoshop filter) to reduce this problem?

Gabor

[scottbergerphoto]

The only documented method to reduce oversaturation of reds at capture is to:
1. Don't overexpose.
2. Use Adobe RGB.
3. Shoot Raw.

[adas]

The 20d has better and less saturated color than any previous camera in its line. So I don't think is a camera issue.
The 20d shot you posted is poorly exposed compared to the Sony Mavica shot. Use the second parameter or RAW.