Need help with editing

We would need to see examples of photos you’ve taken to help. What editing software have you tried to adjust the colors on?

 

What's wrong is white balance!
Phone cameras adjust their white balance to produce an "average" result.
Therefore anytime they're presented with any scene dominated by unexpected
color they err badly.

The only good fix for this is to set the camera (phone) to the correct WB for your
ambient illumination. Or better, shoot in RAW format. This captures the image
as it comes from the sensor and before WB is established. Then you can apply
the correct WB in your RAW image conversion tool. Once you have a final image
fixing a WB error is nearly impossible.

Some phone cameras allow RAW image capture. The correct fix for your difficulty
is to shoot in RAW format and then fix the WB with your RAW image conversion tool.
All RAW image processors include a WB adjustment tool. To get the white balance
correct take a photo with a neutral gray card included in the shot. Set that to neutral
with your WB adjust tool and note the resultant color temp. Then in your doll shot,
taken in the same light of course, apply that same correction. Problem solved!
Feel free to send me a PM if this isn't clear.

 

Wow that is a frustrating amount of fluctuation in his color! It probably happens to all skin tones in different lighting, but it’s more noticeable here with the purple because it’s sucking all the blue out of the image and making him look like he’s neon fuchsia.

I agree that it’s probably your camera’s white balance. Basically, your phone’s sensor is taking in the whole frame of the picture to decide how it “sees” each color—that can throw things off from what your eye sees in real life. I don’t know what phone you have, but in Apple IOS (which is what I use) it can sometimes help to click on the subject you’re photographing as you’re taking the picture (it tells the camera that you’re looking to light the photo based on the subject). I can also click edit on a photo I’ve taken and fiddle around with editing before I ever go to a photo app.

However, that’s not going to be helpful to you if you’re not on the same system so here is how you can adjust your white balance in the Flickr app:

Click here to get into settings:


Then here to find the slider for white balance:


You want to drag to the left to put more blue into the photo. You could also try fiddling with saturation, color balance, and levels (which are some of the other icons on this second page). There’s some trial and error involved, but eventually you’ll figure out what editing tools look right to you.

You could also try putting him in front of different colored backgrounds and see if one or the other tricks the camera into reading his skin tone differently. I used to have a tan Fairyland doll from the same batch as my friend’s and hers would always photograph six shades more orange because he was in pastels and mine was in darker tones.

He might also do better in daylight than artificial light because artificial light adds a lot of yellow to photos and that seems to be the enemy here.

Sorry that was a lot of rambling, but I hope it helps!

 

@AkioMoichi Editing is a whole other art form with a learning curve all its own. You really do have to play around to find what works for you. However, a couple of things I should point out here:

• You are using a blue filter. When you drag the white balance to the left, it adds more blue to the entire photo to compensate for all that pink in his skin tone. It’s going to add blue to the background too.
• There’s a reason every website that wants to sell you something mentions that colors might look different on your monitor. I have a weird succession where it’s like laptop > ipad > phone in terms of brightness, so everything I edit on my computer I have to make a little more bright than I want it so it’ll look good when I get on my other screens.

If the blue background is bothering you when you get him to the color you want, you’re going to want to invest in some better editing software that will allow you to shift his color balance without tinting the rest of the photo. Flickr is pretty rudimentary, because given the population on Flickr I’d bet most people don’t use its editing tools. Whether you want to go full Photoshop or find an alternative is up to you, but the way of selectively editing is very different depending on which one you use, so you would have to look up tutorials specific to the program/app you choose.

You could also explore a little more of what your phone’s camera will allow you to control, or get a camera that allows you to control your own white balance. I don’t usually fiddle around with those settings much because I’ve already done it on my camera. It’s a lot easier to adjust as you take the photo than to try and make the photo look like you used different settings afterwards.

Good luck!

 

If you are working on a .jpg image it has already been processed by your phone's internal editing program. This image cannot, repeat cannot be color corrected in editing.

There are two possible solutions.

1 - Set the phone camera setting for the correct illumination. e.g. Sunlight, cloudy, fluorescent, ...

2 - Use your camera phone RAW image capture and correct the WB in your RAW image converter.

A RAW image is 12 or 14 bit data and .JPG is 8 bits. That's 16X or 64X richer data to work with.
If your white balance is off at capture time then once it has been processed into a JPG you will not
be able to fix it satisfactorily in editing.

Since you do have an editor that will do WB correction then include something that's true neutral
gray in your photo. A standard grey card such as those made by Whi-Bal are a good choice or even
a sheet of white paper. Set this to neutral with your editor.

If the color looks dramatically different on your phone than on your computer suggests that you
have other problems. The same image should look similar on all your screens. If it doesn't then
I'd suggest you may be seeing a color space mismatch. Is your phone displaying the image in
a wider color space such as ProPhoto? The bright blue of image doesn't look like a ProPhoto
vs sRGB color space problem but a dramatic difference between screens is worrysome. Screen
to screen differences should be subtle, not dramatic.

How does the image you posted here display on your phone?