The goal for this project was to create a photograph of a family in a Christmas-like setting to be used for Christmas cards. The family consisted of a woman and her two kids, a boy and a girl. The day of the shoot was a bad one from a weather standpoint, so I worked indoors. The only room that worked was the master bathroom. You can laugh about that, but the walls everywhere else were light green (bad color balance), or had lots of pictures on the walls.

“Family Photo Initial” is the photo chosen as a starting point. The Jacuzzi was ideal because the light from my flash reflected off the walls and filled in the shadows.

“Family Photo Retouched” is the retouched version. Substitution of one face from another image (using the seamless quick mask method) and some retouching work was used.  However, the background was not very Christmas-like. So I made a selection of the group in Photoshop to add to a different background.

“Fall Background”. I took this photo in my backyard to use as a possible background for the photo.

“Family Photo on Fall background”. The layer from the retouched Family Photo was superimposed on the Fall Background. I figured the red leaves would look colorful enough to pass as a Christmas background. However, my client said it was really more of a fall background. Oh well!

“Festival of Lights Background”.  This photo, taken at the local Festival of Lights, was in my archive of background images.

“Family Photo Festival Background”.  I positioned the selection on the Festival of Lights background image and arrived at this composite image.

The people show up fairly well on the darker, more Christmas-like background.   The client liked that combination for a Christmas card.

“Family Photo Resized on Festival of Lights background”. The client’s cards accept a 4×6 photo, but the actual cutout is 3¼x4¾ inches. So I needed to shrink down the selection and make it fit inside that cutout, while leaving the background image at 4×6. That worked fine. I made a mistake the first time and forgot to use the shift key when resizing the selection layer in Photoshop.  That keeps the aspect ratio constant while reducing the size. It also helped to place guide lines on the image to mark the cutout position.  But as you can see from the result, finally it all worked OK.

The images were uploaded to a proof gallery on my SmugMug site for the client to view.  Although she liked the way the image of the family looked on the background, the face tones were too red for her taste.  It could have been a monitor problem, but when I checked carefully I noticed the same thing on my calibrated monitor.  I have had some experience with correcting those types of problems, but decided to go to the help section and check out SmugMug’s advice.  There I found a fair amount of useful information (http://www.smugmug.com/help/photo-tools-menu).  There are two main ways to fix the problem.  The easiest is to simply use the “tanning salon” available for images on SmugMug.  In that case you just go to the “Tools/This Photo/More/Apply Color Effect, and click on “tanning salon”.  The face tones are automatically adjusted. On the site that looked pretty good. Another easy way is to enable color correction before printing.

But I wanted to know a little more about what adjustment was needed to the actual photo to make the face tones look right.  I found this article: http://www.smugmug.com/help/skin-tone.  There I discovered that the actual colors on a Caucasian or Oriental face need to have a certain ratio between Magenta, Yellow, and Cyan.  To see what that is you have to open the image in Photoshop and place the cursor on a spot on a face, then read the CMYK values on the info palate. Yellow should be higher than Magenta by about 10-20%, and Cyan should be about 33% of Magenta. It varies somewhat for different races, obviously, but you never want Yellow to be the same as, or lower than Magenta, which mine were.  If the ratio is not correct it needs to be adjusted.  Some simple and more complicated ways to do that are explained in the help article.  The actual numbers can be higher or lower depending on the surroundings and other factors.  I took the simple route.

Here are the steps:

Go to Image > Adjustments > Levels.  A small window will appear.  Choose the blue channel from the pull-down menu.  For input levels, make the center one become 0.90. You’ll see your image warm up.  (For really red images, you could go to 0.85.)  Click OK. Go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation.  Choose the red channel from the pull-down menu.  Shift the slider to -7.  Click “OK”.  That’s all there is to it.

“Family Photo Resized on Festival of Lights Background_faces corrected”.  The final version is shown here.  The ratios of Yellow/Magenta/Cyan are 46:36:8 on a spot on the forehead of my client, while the starting ratio was 41:37:7 on the same spot.  I printed it on my Epson 3800 printer using Epson Luster paper and it looks great!

The next part of this project was seeing what works best for prints from Bay Photo. To do this I uploaded the images  without correction to my SmugMug site, and sent an order to Bay Photo for 4×6 prints on glossy, lustre, and metallic surfaces.  My evaluation of those resulted in the preliminary conclusion that lustre works best.   The face tones on metallic looked much redder.  Glossy was just too hot.  Lustre had just the right effect for face tones.  But these results were based on the non-corrected images.  My client liked the look of the metallic paper, so we ordered metallic surface prints of my corrected final image.  The final product inserted into the card had perfectly colored face tones and bright metallic blue trees in the background.  Very Christmas-like!

The take-home lesson was that if the face tones are properly adjusted, metallic prints give dramatic and very pleasing results.  Other examples of family portraits, as well as fine art photographs of landscapes, wildlife, and other types of subjects, are available for viewing at http://www.allindaphoto.com.