Photoshop Pros - Need Your Advice

[Loupey]

Thought I would come back to this in hopes that it may help others.

After buying the upgrade to CS2 a few weeks ago, my first redo was this project. After a short time of trial and error, I was able to make a drastic improvement over the original edit. I see areas that I would like to further correct (hot spots, color correction, shadow detail) in the future.

Both are from the same RAW file.

Both the interior designer and the carpenter who crafted the hand-made table were very happy with the work (both paid for several prints from this job ). I have been asked to return to this home to shoot other rooms that they designed/built.

[another view]

You're off to a good start! The modified version looks a little over-done to me, but you'll get more comfortable with PS with more use. Mostly, the colors are a bit saturated - adjusting it down a little might help. I do like the contrast adjustment though.

Two different light sources with very different color temperatures will always lead to bigger differences in an image than how your eye sees it. Incandescent and halogen is in the 2700-3100k range and daylight shade is probably closer to 8000k or higher. If it were me, I'd probably pick a white that was lit with the incandescent room light with the eyedropper in Photoshop's RAW converter.

I suppose you could adjust the blue saturation to lessen that effect (which looks fine to me) or do something a lot more complicated (which is beyond me!) if you really wanted it to look the same as the interior lighting. Like I'm getting at; sometimes less is more!