Skin tones

Ahhhhhhhhhh, good skin tones…..the ultimate photoshop tutorial

The search for the holy grail of digital photography. We have been banging our heads against the wall for years trying to perfect “THE ONE SIZE FITS ALL” solution to working with skin tones and were talking about capturing, work  flow, output, the whole nine yards. And here’s what we figured out so far. Skin tones suck.

There is one solution. Convert all your images to B&W.! The End.

Haha.

Actually, here is what we really nailed down so far. Skin tones are subjective. The procedures that ultimately create good skin tones are as follows:

Good capture ….

When you capture the image 99% of your job is done. If your exposures are off and your color balance is off, then your skin tones will be off. Of course this means your light meter will be your best friend (second to your dog). Be on top of your exposures like dirt on a pig. Know your histograms and image tones. Don’t just use your LCD as a reference.
Your LCD brightness varies, and is not 100% reliable to use on it’s own, however it is an integral tool that works with everything else. Never get lazy here, always check your exposure, know your exposures and keep it accurate. Make this a part of your mind set and work flow. And don’t forget to test new stuff, never assume….

Color balance ….
We like to shoot a grey card under the lighting conditions we are shooting in as a custom white balance setting. For some reason a greycard seems to work better for us than a white card. What can we say. We get images that are neutral, we can warm them up later if we choose. However, for many digital photographers, using a white card to create their custom white balance seems to work just fine.

Work flow ….
We like to get an idea of what a good skin tone is by using the color picker. Now remember, skin tones are subjective, so it’s purely arbitrary but you will get used to it in time. So, as a rule of thumb, using the color picker, depending on the actual pigmentation of the subject we find the reds are about 20% higher than the green and about 30 – 40% higher than the blue. Since during the capture the tone has been turned off (in camera parameters), we can add more to the skin tone by using color balance and saturation. Sometimes we have to select only the face area with a soft feather, and beef up just the face.

Although skin tones are somewhat subjective, you can capture a neutral image, with no color cast or exposure issues, and work from that as your starting point to ultimately create great looking skin tones.

Note the image above. The color picker was placed in the forehead area. Note the ratio of red, green and blue.

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