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I took a few shots of my baby with Canon EOS 450D (ISO 400, flash, focal length 31mm). Now the baby in the image looks like she has reddish hair and some red spots on the face. And my baby has blondish hair and the face pure as milk.

Can anyone suggests how can I now fix too much red color in photoshop? I tried decreasing red color, but only that this not help. Is there some tool that can do this automatically?

PS. I am not a professional photographer :)

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    \$\begingroup\$ Could you post an example? I know people don't always want to put their baby pictures into the hands of strangers. \$\endgroup\$
    – mattdm
    Nov 9, 2013 at 12:37
  • \$\begingroup\$ Is there something known white in the image? If so, use that as a gray reference to fix the colors. If not, you'll have to do it by eyeball, which is not as accurate and relies on the monitor and the room illumination. Next time if there is nothing white in the scene, take a separate picture with something known white in it, keep as close as possible to the same setup, scene, and lighting as the real picture. \$\endgroup\$
    – Olin Lathrop
    Nov 9, 2013 at 13:21
  • \$\begingroup\$ sorry cannot post any image, all are from my baby. \$\endgroup\$
    – sandImage
    Nov 9, 2013 at 17:48
  • \$\begingroup\$ Thanks guys. Will try to fix it by gray reference as you suggested. \$\endgroup\$
    – sandImage
    Nov 9, 2013 at 17:52

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I suspect what happened is that you used the flash, which is meant to approximate the color temperature of sunlight, but had the camera set to indoor, incandescent lighting white balance. (Or, possibly, auto white balance that just went wrong.)

There are many ways to adjust this in Photoshop and in other editing tools. The Levels tool is probably the primary one to use, and is easy if there happens to be an object in the photo which is actually neutral gray. Use the middle eye dropper to pick the gray object and the rest will be computed.

In Photoshop, often the easiest way is to add an Adjustment Layer specifically for Color Balance. The details of how to do that are described in this Adobe tutorial.

If you happen to have the RAW file, this is easiest of all, because RAW development tools will have a direct white balance tool where you can correct this directly with little to no loss of quality.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Haven't used level or Adjustement layer but will definitely try. Thanks for suggestion \$\endgroup\$
    – sandImage
    Nov 9, 2013 at 17:51
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You may use lightroom or similar software to do this job more efficiently than photoshop. In lighroom you can grab individual colour channel and change the lightness, saturation, hue according to your taste.

I am using 450D for last 3 years, but I did not notice such phenomenon ever. Few sample pictures would be helpful to answer more accurately.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ all pictured from my baby. cannot share. sorry \$\endgroup\$
    – sandImage
    Nov 9, 2013 at 17:51

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