Fishing with Dad

[Frog]

Thankyou all for help and advice. If it makes a dif, I'm using pse 5.0
I actually don't think I did anything with saturation in the first set.
My sons face always shows up quite red...part of that rudy outdoor look I guess but it doesn't look good in photos. I had nice even cloudy light most of the day until the sun decided to make brief appearance for these shots.
Here are the un edited except for resize.

[CLKunst]

OK! That's more like it! I was really afraid to comment just in case your son had some sort of skin condition or natural discoloration on his face. Here are a couple good rules of thumb for photo editing.

First, consider that an image editor, even PSE, is actually a VERY powerful tool, like a laser, so a light touch is always the best approach. It's very easy to over do it and take a picture that was fine to begin with and turn into a psychedelic experience. Unless that's what you're going for.

Second, outside of small blemishes, wrinkles and zits, I try to stay FAR AWAY from selectively correcting portions of a subject's face beyond any "improvements" they might specifically request. There is no easy way to do what you are trying to do. By "normalizing" his coloring using the selection brush with broad strokes it will always come out looking disfigured and blotchy, in short, unrealistic. PSE does have a wonderful little feature under the Enhance menu called "Adjust for Skin Color". This feature adjusts the entire color balance of the picture based on selection of a specific point on the subject's skin (the pinkest point). If your son's face really feels redder than natural for you try playing with this feature and do a little read up on it in the Help section. I would also suggest trying out the "Remove Color Cast" feature also located in the same drop down menu. It works best when the selection point is a spot of true black, white, or grey. And if all else fails, (Ronnoco's gonna hate me double for suggesting this. J/K Ron!) Convert it to black and white and turn that ruddy red grey!! But that's another lesson.

Third, never make grand dramatic changes like this directly to your actual image as this causes deterioration of the file info and degrades image quality which translates into ugly print. Try out major edits in a duplicate layer or four as you can adjust the density of the layers and you don't get so much noise and loss.

As a critique of your photos, not your editing, I think your originals are worlds better. They look more natural and therefore believable, which is more important than color saturation when you are using a picture to communicate or document instead of conveying an "artistic" concept. You just want to take beautiful pictures right? It's a bummer on the first one that your son's eyes are closed but it's still a sweet moment. I agree with the crop you made on the second picture although it looks sharper in context of the whole even if it is cluttered perhaps you can give it a little tweak with the Unsharp Mask. I still think you have some great moments here and would suggest a contrast adjustment to both and possibly a warming filter to add the illusion of a hint of sunshine to counteract the grayness of the day. You can find the warming filter (and others cool filters as well) under the Filters drop down menu, then select Adjustments, Photo Filters is at the bottom of the list.

Send me a PM if you have any other questions.

Best,