Damien Symonds

Oh gee, can we talk about this in the Raw Class please?

Oh, bugger. May I see the whole photo, so I can see what you mean?

It's pretty mild, I think we can use the easy option. Add a Solid Color layer of shirt blue, and set its blend mode to "Color".

Yep, that's perfect.

No, that's not the crop tool, that's the marquee tool.

Terrific! So just use your Crop Tool, on the "HxWxResolution" setting exactly as you have it in the screenshot you showed me, and enter "8in", "10in" and "300" in the three fields as usual. Then crop. That's all there is to it.

I don't think you're missing anything, but let's be safe. Can you show me a screenshot of your crop tool settings just before you crop, and also a screenshot of the Image Size dialog that you mentioned, after cropping?

And are they always, and only, 8x10 prints? Never any other size?

For whom? Do you print the photos yourself, or send them to somebody else to print? Or do they get used by a graphic designer?

Good job.

Is it for business cards or something like that?

No, that one looks rather blue.

This will be the result:

Furthermore, we can see that the wall is quite nicely neutral at the bottom. This is a great example of how quickly light falls off in a studio. So we'll aim to match the top of the wall to the bottom. This is the method you'll use: https://www.damiensymonds.net/levels-eyedropper

The first thing we need to clarify is this - you definitely don't want to make it pure white. Bright white, I mean. That would look implausible, and make the child look dark and dull by comparison. What we want is to make it neutral.

Well, the alternative is to get yourself a bottle, and try photographing it at exactly the correct angle, and putting it in there.

No. Prints are never too bright. Prints are what they are. If your print is visually brighter than your screen, it means that your screen is too dark.

Gosh, how troublesome. Without embarking on major pixel cloning, I think it's best to just dull the colours as much as possible?

In case who wants to crop closer? Who uses your photo?

Ah, ok.

Yes, I already answered that. That is a function of the Image Size dialog, it has nothing to do with cropping. You should rarely need to use the Image Size dialog; and if you do, constrain proportions must always be checked, always. You began this thread by asking about the crop tool, and I'm sure you're right - this is definitely about cropping, NOT about Image Size. So I need to know more details about the requirements for these headshots, so I can help you further.

Well, it would need to be a carefully chosen sky, of course. You couldn't whack any old sky in there. It would need to be suitably out-of-focus.

This, I think, is the best we can do with the sky as it exists. If you want more than this, we're in sky replacement territory. It was a levels layer, masked to the sky: Red channel 0/1.50/245 and 85/255 Green channel 0/1.20/250 and 45/240 Blue channel 0/1.00/255 and 0/225

Almost It's untagged. Always make sure you have the profile box checked when saving, for any purpose.

Thanks, I can work with this. I noticed that, in your original post, you provided a screenshot of your photo rather than the photo itself. Can you post the photo for me? In jpeg format is fine.