When blondes aren't

Hi All,

Well most know this, but how do I correct for this.

Hair coloring will show reddish when flash is used. Although she looks blonde in sun light, it looks like below with flash. What white balance to use?

What can be done about this during taking the picture, and what can be done after. The picture was taken in auto white balance.

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have you tried doing a custom WB or at least using the flash WB setting? sometimes AWB can get confused.

the whole shot as a redish tone. you can adjust color balance or curves, hell convert it to a BW. Shooting raw will give you the most options of correction.

Yeah, a bit of a reddish cast all over.

Your white balance is probably too high. If you shoot RAW you can adjust it later, or set a custom white balance before hand.

Kinda what everyone else said.

Rob

David, my experience has been that AWB is wrong about color choice more often than it is correct - particularly indoors. I find it far better to set the camera according to the type of light. Sometimes it takes a little experimentation.

Taking things further - if you shoot in RAW mode, then you get a second chance to set the white balance. When converting from RAW to an editable format, you can choose the white balance setting in much the same way you set it in the camera. There are also other tools in the conversion process that make it easy to tweak the white balance. With Photoshop CS2, there is even a batch tool so that you can apply the same correction to a batch of files that you want to convert after correcting one.

If her jacket is a neutral gray, then the white balance in the photo is probably just about right overall. The subject is a little red-complected, that's all.

Similar issue sometimes seen with flash on black-haired subjects -- you get red reflecting highlights. I'm not sure but I think it has to do with reflected light and transmitted light. Perhaps illuminate the hair from behind a little? (I don't have enough flash units to try this myself).

good luck.

Thanks all, I will WB experiment. I'll just have to see what works best for flash under all the differing conditions I use it.

Here is an adjustment to the other end, a little bluish perhaps. But it does show how red the original is.

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Chaz - the whites of her eyes are blue. her teeth are blue. the shadow areas on her cheek and chin are blue. what are you, a democrat or something?

It's better than this.

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Here's my shot at it. I adjusted each color level by hand.

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It's so hard to choose nowadays; they're all up to their armpits in troubles.

The "too blue" was on purpose just to see the contrast, but themirage did a fine job in balancing the color.

Here's my version. I used a Channel Mixer adjustment layer, adjusting the Green channel(Green 80%, Red 20%) and Blue channel (Blue 90%, Red 10%), no adjustment to Red Channel. The face is still a bit warm, but the neutrals are neutral. It should be easy to tweak it to your taste from here. This is a correction I learned from a discussion on the Rob Gailbraith forum about excessive reds in Canon skin tones.

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You could just use 90% method using her eyes if you shot in jpg.

Go to Adobe CS 2 learning center and register (free).

Then go to CS and CS2 techniques. The name is Eddie Tapp and his Pro Technique I: 90% method. Have a go on that.

Use the flash WB setting next time it should come out much better than AWB.