I took this picture a couple of weeks ago (while we still had our Christmas tree up) and it has a pretty glaring problem: it is overexposed. If you can't tell right away from looking at it, that's ok - you will learn with experience. The most obvious clue is the neon yellow in the cheek and nose. If that doesn't seem obvious, consider the histogram:
All of you faithful readers will immediately notice the spike on the right side of the red-channel graph. So the problem is that the colors in the skin look unnatural and uneven. One way to correct this problem is to adjust the exposure compensation, which I did, to -.7 (in this case.) Here are the results:
So I ended up with a better looking histogram. The image is better too, but now seems dark. That's ok though. It's more important to get a good exposure that doesn't fall out of the range of what your sensor can record. Because I captured all the information, a quick adjustment in photoshop produced this:
This was a quick fix, because the second exposure produced an image file with all the information intact. It would have been impossible to "fix" the first image because once you blow a channel(s) out, you can't get that information back.
