Brendan,
I took the liberty of color correcting your "granny" shot. It appeared way too red on my calibrated monitor and I am sure Granny hadn't been walking the beach and forgot her sunscreen, she looks horribly sun burned! A tell tale sign are lips that are the same color as the rest of the face on the skin! Personally I never use any of the auto WB modes, I always find something between 12 and 18% grey to meter a spot on, however it's possible to recover a perfect white balance (without NC3 and NEF's) by using Photoshops eyedropper in the curves tool to rebalance the image if you can't meter a spot at the scene. Here's how I did it with your shot...
First, the histogram of the original shot.
Fig. 1 Looks okay, distributed pretty well so the exposure was more or less fine, except for the peak of data in the deep shadows which we will deal with later.
First thing is to set a better WB, we do this by entering the Curves tool and selecting the middle eyedropper, then we go over the image and pick something that provides (or should have provided) a middle grey tone, for some reason pupils and the whites of the eyes tend to serve as good targets for this. I clicked in Granny's eye with the eyedropper twice before getting the WB as you see it in the final image. (Took literally 5 seconds)
Fig. 2 Photoshop curves tool with "set grey point" eyedropper (center) selected.
Now that the WB is fine, I wanted to redistribute the chroma a bit to effect some saturation in Granny's midtones. There is another trick you can use to find out where Granny's tones are, you first click a point on the curve and then still in eye dropper mode, click over the image, you'll notice as you move the eyedropper over the image a little circle hops up and down the curve showing where the sampled tonal component is on the curve...this is a great way to know exactly where to make your curve adjustments. I did this and decided I wanted to bring out tones in Granny's face and ornamented blouse but not in her already white hair and sweater. I picked points in the curve near the highlights (as determined by the previous trick) so that when I moved the lower portions of the curve the top portion wouldn't budge, this way the highlights would be kept relatively fixed in comparison to the shadows and midtones. (Took about 15 seconds)
Fig. 3 Finished curve, highlights "pinned" with a bump over the shadow/midtone region to bring that chroma out a bit.
Comparing the final histogram to the first, shows that highlights were indeed controlled and shadow and midtone data redistributed. Note in Fig. 4 how that original tall peak in the shadows has now been eroded some what, hopefully gone to contribute to a more vibrant and life like final image.
Fig. 4 Final histogram after curves tool modifications.
I reduced the image you posted by 55% and combined the unedited and my edited version, I then saved them as jpg with quality 10. I didn't do any sharpening as it seemed sharp enough even after the reduction in size and compression.
Before (Left) and After Images:
Fig. 5 Fini!
I don't know about you, but on my monitor Granny on the right looks a lot more natural, she's even got more detail in her face (maybe Granny wouldn't like that part of it..but at least it's more faithful !) no more lobster effect and you can tell where her lips merge into her face! Don't take this as a critique of your original image, I just want to point out that there is so much more that can be done by the photographer outside of playing with the camera settings even when shooting
lowly jpeg shots. Thanks for posting !
Regards,
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