Damien Symonds

This is vitally important. You must NEVER look at skintone when editing raw files. Until you accept this, you can never grow as an editor.

Just keep warming it until the jacket in the photo matches the jacket in your hand. It's easy, don't worry.

Keep going. It's nowhere near grey yet.

Gosh no, you don't need new prints!!!!! The prints you already have are fine. This will be a problem. Millers and Mpix are shit. For the actual act of calibration, you should be in as dim light as possible. So yes, definitely close the blinds for that. For the actual editing, bright light is good, as long as it's not hitting you directly. Maybe you could show me a photo of your room?

Did you get the coat?

Terrific! Get the jacket out of the washing basket, to see how inaccurate your white balance is. Or, if the child isn't asleep, ask her to come in to your office so you can check if her hair really is purple

No, come on, the white balance is appalling. Is this your own child?

Yep, sure, we can do this! First, go ahead and do your raw processing on your photo as normal, then post it again and we'll discuss the artistic editing.

Hi Traci, what instructions have the yearbook people given you for the photo? Some of them specify the height of the head, or whatever.

Terrific! We can easily set up a little action to do this for us. Have you mocked one up? We need to start by working out how wide the white border will be around the three thin edges.

Let me know what they say.

No, not at all. The profile for magazine - even a non-glossy one - is very different from newsprint. This is the more relevant article. In short, you have to ask them (and ask them, and ask them, and ask them, until you get a reasonable answer) to provide a profile.

Oh darn, that will make things harder. Still, I strongly recommend you open the people photo like this so you can fix the white balance and exposure.

Hi Kelly, When we get to the end of the process, they'll need some shadowing under them to make it plausible. But that's not the problem at the moment. The problem is the light. Did you shoot them in raw?

I think this will depend where you're getting them printed. Does your lab have a special "polaroid" product? Or are you just getting normal prints (6x4s) with appropriately aligned white space?

No, you're right. This is a common problem, sadly. Those "dumb" websites have no parameters for enlargement, they just look for numbers of pixels. Everyone who sells digital files face this problem from time to time. It's yet another reason why you should be aiming to shift your business model towards printing, not selling digitals. For now, find out what size they are trying to print, and which files, and resize them specifically and send them again.

Oh yes, 80 is very common. Even 70 in some cases.

How long since you last used this calibrator successfully? I suspect it's dying.

Is there a question to go with this photo?

Ok, thanks!!!

I have a method that would turn a three-hour job into a two-and-a-half hour job. I can share it with you if you like, but honestly, it's not worth it.

No no, the raw processing is much too dark. You have to open up those shadow areas a LOT, if we're any chance here.

You should just be able to drag and drop it from its original location. For example, if it was an Effect, open the Effects panel and find it there, then drag and drop it to your Favourites.

That's a huge loss of detail. I rather doubt it. Can you explain the situation? Why does it need to be that small?

Yes, easily passable. It's a huge pity when eyes don't have the same focus, and moreso when it's the front one that missed. Technically speaking, if you wanted to do this perfectly, you'd apply about 0.8 of Gaussian Blur to the sharp eye to make it match the front one. It would make them even, and they'd still both be razor sharp once sharpened for output (which I know you know how to do, since you're in the Sharpening Class). However, I know that the idea of blurring eyes, even a little bit, scares the crap out of most people, so they generally live with one looking a bit worse than the other.