gdanmitchell Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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An image like this raises all kinds of interesting post processing questions, some technical and some aesthetic. I'm not going to attempt to deal with all of them, but a few thoughts...
"Correcting" colors in a photograph made in a mixed lighting environment like this one is extremely tricky. It is unlikely that any global adjustment (aside from going to black and white!) will resolve all of them — adjust to minimize the warm yellow of that very bright (and distracting) lamp behind your subject and you'll amplify the issues with the blue colors from the lamps on the tree. Try to correct the skin tones (which are far from natural, again from the tree lights) and other colorations will become far worse.
In addition, I'm betting that various color channels are blown out in different parts of the scene. You have likely blown the red channel in the area of that lamp and perhaps on the back of the shirt. It is possible that you have blown the blue channel in some spots as well, perhaps including the boy's face. (Here, shooting the photograph differently might have helped — though that may not have been possible. I might have positioned the camera so that the lamp was out of the frame. I might have considered at least a bit of fill flash, both to counteract some of the very bright areas and to diminish the contribution of the highly colored areas relative to the overall scene.)
As to the aesthetic issue, you probably do not want to color to be completely neutral in the end. The boy's face should be blue, since he is facing the blue light of the tree. This means that the goal is probably not to get to a "normal" color balance (which would lose the very quality of the image) but to back off a bit on the intensity of the color shifts.
Good luck.
Dan
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