Help with a blue-haired baby?

So I get home from the in-laws' and look at some pix I took of my niece and notice for the first time that her hair has turned blue. After a quick phone call to make sure that her hair isn't actually blue and I just didn't notice (it isn't), I determined that it must have been caused by light coming through the bluish curtains. That's my guess anyway -- it showed up on pictures from two different cameras, but only on pictures taken in the early afternoon with her sitting on that couch.

Anywho, I like some of the pics -- except for the blue hair. Using Elements 9 I've had a little luck playing around with "Replace Color", and desaturating the blues and magentas under "Adjust Hue/Saturation", and using a mask to just apply this to her hair. But I seem to have some trouble with getting color back into her hair -- often it is just ending up being a dullish gray. I also have Lightroom 3, if you think I'd be better off using that for some of the work (I've used it for desaturating the blue hair in some and found it to be pretty effective. Again, it's the putting color back in that I'm having trouble with.)
Any advice/thoughts on how you would approach this would be appreciated.

Here's a pic, to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

IMAGE LINK: http://www.pixentral.c​om …v7nEyjt4qyC65rk​Jq1scFQHog

Maybe instead of desaturating it, you could try turning the blue to brown? Or is that too obvious?

This is likely a white balance issue - looks like you shot AUTO white balance and the majority of the scene demanded a tungsten-like white balance, but the daylight coming in from behind the subject turned bluish as a result. That is, you had mixed lighting to which the camera added blue to neutralize the warmish nature of the dominant light falling on the subject, causing the already blush daylight rim lighting to go even more blue.

Warm the image and then warm another copy of the image even more on a separate layer and paint that super warm image back into the hair areas.

If you shot raw you can make two copies of the image, one white balanced for the skin tones and one for the daylight rim lighting on the hair- then blend those two images painting on layer masks.

Kirk

kirkt wrote in post #13324517
This is likely a white balance issue - looks like you shot AUTO white balance and the majority of the scene demanded a tungsten-like white balance, but the daylight coming in from behind the subject turned bluish as a result. That is, you had mixed lighting to which the camera added blue to neutralize the warmish nature of the dominant light falling on the subject, causing the already blush daylight rim lighting to go even more blue.

Warm the image and then warm another copy of the image even more on a separate layer and paint that super warm image back into the hair areas.

If you shot raw you can make two copies of the image, one white balanced for the skin tones and one for the daylight rim lighting on the hair- then blend those two images painting on layer masks.

Kirk

^^ what he said!

Well, I'm having a little luck I think. I keep playing around with various things. So far, it appears I just need to practice my Replace Color skills. I had tried just turning the blue to brown, but I couldn't get it to look natural at all. But I've been playing around with changing the blend mode to Color, and sampling a couple different places of brown hair and have been able to make it look a little better.

Changing the white balance definitely helps lessen the blue -- a lot -- but I can't seem to get rid of it entirely like that. I may just need to keep practicing though -- I'm not gonna be winning any Photoshop skills contests anytime soon!

Here's the best I've been able to come up with so far (which really is probably good enough -- it's not like these are being sold or anything. It's just to give the grandparents some pics of the baby.) But I'm gonna keep trying. And if all else fails, there's always black and white, but that feels like a bit of a cop-out.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.pixentral.c​om …0uIpDv37yNRC065​Eu51Altrj1

Use the White Balance for the overall skin tone, not the little hair bits. I'd say do did a good job on the hair in the pic above, but the skin looks "cool" to me as far as the WB. Maybe that's just me, but I'd say it could use some "warming up".