This little sweetie this week comes from Shelle of www.mommycantsing.com. She caught a darling little photo of her baby girl at the end of the day after the good light was gone! Oh my, have I sure been there! Indoor lighting can be pretty tricky, often casting a non-desirable color over our sweet subjects. 
I wanted to create a very simple edit to clean up the color. Since this was a Project 365 photo to capture a moment in Shelle’s baby’s life, I thought it would be perfect to fix the color and leave everything as is, to preserve that moment as it was captured.
So here are my simple editing steps!
- First, I created a Color Balance Adjutment Layer to fix the color issue. I moved the top slider towards Cyan quite a bit. Then I moved the middle slider towards Magenta a teeny bit. Last, I moved the bottom slider towards Blue a little. The settings from left to right were: -73, -3, +11.
- Next, I created a Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer and selected “Black & White with Yellow Filter” from the preset dropdown menu. I then set the blending mode to Screen and the opacity to 65%. This lightened the photo up nicely.
- Then I lightened up her eyes a little and dodged the catchlights just a little bit to bring some sparkle back.
- Finally, I duplicated the layers into one by pressing Control > Alt > Shift > E. I applied the Reduce Noise filter with the default settings.
And that’s it! The color balance tool is an easy way to help fix color-cast issues. It’s not perfect, but for little memory shots like these, it’s a great help!
The final image:
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Beautiful, Michelle! Especially when you put the two side by side- wow! You did a great job! Thank you so much for taking the time to work on my photo!
Wow! You did a wonderful job! I edited it but never got around to posting it on my blog. LOL