Help with Color

[Kaye]

My favorite thing to photograph is sports, esp little kids baseball, high school girls softball and men's softball. But lately i've been wanting to try and get better at portrait photography. Below is a photo I took yesterday and although I was somewhat happy with them on the computer I was not as happy with them when printed (at Wal Mart). I think something about the color is putting me off a little. I would appreciate any opinions on the color (esp the skin tones and greens). Or any other areas you think might help me improve.
Thanks You!



The rest of the set can be viewed on my flickr, link below.

[zona5101]

In shade the color temp is higher in shade (cooler towards blue) The green in the bushes is cooling too. You might want to check the color balance and see if you were at 5500 daylight and adjust it up in post. That will warm it a bit. The pink/reds might be a little hot. But overall it looks pretty good.

Did your print look about the same?

[Kaye]

Thanks for replying Zona. The print looked a little rich I think is the word I would use. Not really bad but maybe toned down the green background would have been a little better to me. I don't shoot in RAW so not sure about the color balance.

[kleidascope]

another tip - outside of your photo. In my experience, I find that Wal-mart prints are 'darker' compared to what I see on my computer. As it was explained to me... All of the photo processing centers have 'auto correction' on their machines so when uploading to Walmart/Walgreens (those 'box store') sites - once you upload your photos, call the store, ask them when processing your order can they turn off the auto processing. 99% of the time they are more than happy to do so. Every once in a while you'll get a crabby sales associate on the other end. I have found that my photos printed there when doing that are WAY more accurate. (I don't usually advocate using these labs for 'professional' prints, but I DO use them for some of my stuff, depending on what I'm doing with it). It's also my understanding that you can't calibrate your monitor to a walgreens or a walmart, but most 'professional' labs you would want to calibrate if you are going to use the same lab for the majority of your prints.