Reply To: Did my bestie use a fauxtog?

[cameraclicker]

@lemonblue — The baby’s headband appears to have been white lace.  Even relatively inexpensive editing programs like Photoshop Elements can adjust colour balance, sometimes called white balance, if there is a suitable neutral colour available as a reference.  White, black and grey items make good references.  If you have digital images, you have something that can be adjusted, at least a little and probably enough in this case.   That won’t fix a bad pose but it will improve the appearance.  You could learn to do it yourself or find someone who understands how to retouch images.  A retoucher can tone down or replace a bad background, too.

@what.dreams — I agree with Nightrose.  If you aspire to be more than a beginner, you need calibrated equipment.  The least expensive is to have and use a grey card.  There are several ways to use it depending on your work flow and what you are trying to accomplish.  You can use it to set a custom white balance and set the exposure in camera, or you can shoot it in the scene to use as a reference to adjust your editing later.  If you are going to adjust later, shoot to raw files instead of JPEG.  The camera throws away most of the sensor data if it makes a JPEG and you may not have enough data left to do a good white balance adjustment.  If you are saving to JPEG, keep an eye on the light and adjust each time the light changes.  For something like four times the cost, you can get an Expodisc which will let you set the camera but it will not serve as a reference in an image.  Something like a Spyder  or Colormunki is a step up, but not a replacement for having a good colour reference.  At the top of the scale are monitors that calibrate themselves.  Notebooks have terrible monitors and the trend is to put the worst quality hardware in, then cover it with a coating that’s so shiny you can do your make up, or shave, with it.  The better monitors tend to have a mat finish when they are turned off.  Room light affects the appearance of your display and also of prints, so you have to be careful of ambient light when editing.  If you do your own printing, then there is a piece of the Spyder system for profiling your printer, the Colormunki has printer profiling built in.  You have to create a profile for each paper type you use.  This little diatribe barely scratches the surface of any of these topics but hopefully provides hints about some of the research you have to do.