Reply To: Honest Feedback requested!

[Bill]

ErikC – I am glad to hear that you are understanding. Most people that come asking for critiques get uber-offended when people start pointing out certain flaws that others see in their work. It is sometimes hard to take but like you stated in your original post, friends and family opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.

Glad to hear about the babies safety, I was hoping that all the pit crew just just out of frame, but we have seen some real winners when it comes to babies. Don’t get some of the others stated on that topic.

For your watermark, I would use a much smaller watermark that does not divert your attention from the main subject, hard to do when it is right smack in the middle. A smaller watermark is fine and can be placed somewhere outside the main subject area but close enough to prevent people from cropping it out if they were to download it.
If you have a web site platform that allows you to disable the “right-click” then that is an option. I use Zenfolio for my site, and it has a photo asset manager built in to allow or prevent downloading images. It does a lot more, but I don’t want to sound like a sales pitch.

For the image displaying the photos, If you have the option to control the look and feel of the way the images are presented, then it is best to try to take full control of that for your benefit. Only show your best!.
If you do a session and it has a progressive flow that tells a story, that works. Your using the images to convey to your audience what has transpired. You heard that a picture is worth a 1000 words? that is what you are trying to do with your images, not just “here are some pics of this guy and girl with their baby.”

As for the skin tone and color correction, these are 2 different aspects that share a common relation. Color correction is best done when your monitor has been calibrated with your X-rite or other device. This way, you see your blacks as blacks and your whites as whites. Without a calibrated monitor, you may be able to get close, but you will most likely has variances when it comes to certain things, like skin tone. And this is where they are related.
A person’s skin tone can change with many situations, but you want to convey their best skin tone (color) based on your exposure and lighting conditions. Their skin color may look different from if they were posed in direct sunlight as to posed under a tree in shade.
With Adobe Camera Raw, (part of Photoshop) and many other applications, you can adjust the temperature of your photos. For your direct sunlight photo, you can add more blue (Daylight = 5500K) to counter act the bright sun. For your shade you can add more yellow (shade = 7500K) to add more yellow to warm the photo up, this counter-acts the lack of sunlight.
To do this without a calibrated monitor is tricky, because you have no basis of what true black and true white actually are. This is why you will see photos where people have blueish, green or pink tints to their skin color.
Babies are very susceptible to being very cold, so they naturally look blue. You would normally use a heater to keep baby warm, but if they have a blue tint, you can correct that in post by adjusting the temperature. Not too much, because they will look like an ummpah loompah.

The X-rite does not fix anything, it just allows you to adjust your monitor to provide the truest color profile so that what you see on your monitor is as true as it can get. Without being adjusted and calibrated, what you see as green may be actually more blue.