Th Clvr Mnky

((: Just adorable!!!!!! :))

I had a hard time balancing the skin tones and the orange of the couch. When in doubt, try monochrome!

@mramshaw: most cameras do have a little computer that guesses at scenes and tries to make ideal skin tones, but most of the time this is only useful when the camera makes JPEGs. If you shoot raw, then pretty much only the white balance is there to set overall tone and hue.

If you use the manufacturers software that can read the camera "profiles" it can automatically generate images that are more suitable for "portrait" or more "landscape." But then you have to use the manufacturers software! Given how awful the Nikon software is, I choose Adobe Lightroom instead, and adjust things myself. Lightroom has customizable camera profiles (based on the built-in profiles, where possible) that you can use to do this sort of thing nicely. Or you can define your own, as I have done.

The real problem here is that there was no easy neutral to base the white balance on, so no matter what I did the skin tone was odd (and the colour cast from the orange couch was making it hard to find something reasonable to the eye.)

After struggling with it, I realized I really wanted the texture and tone of the feet to be the star of this shot, and a relatively low-contrast dreamy monochrome treatment seemed to do the trick.

Really, I just muddle through all of this stuff the best I can.