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Skintones
Ahhhhhhhhhh, good skintones.....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 skintones and were talking about
capturing, workflow, output, the whole nine yards. And here's what we figured out so far. Skintones 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. Skintones are subjective. The procedures that ultimately create good skintones are as follows:
Good capture ....
When you capture the image 99% of your job is done. If your exposures are off and your colorbalance is off, then your skintones will be off. Of course this means your lightmeter 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 workflow. And don't forget to test new stuff, never assume....
Colorbalance ....
We like to shoot a greycard under the lighting conditions we are shooting in as a custom whitebalance setting. For some reason a greycard seems to work better for us than a whitecard. What can we say. We get images
that are neutral, we can warm them up later if we choose. However, for many digiatl photographers, using a white card to create their custom white balance weems to work just fine.
Workflow ....
We like to get an idea of what a good skintone is by using the colorpicker. Now remember, skintones 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 ctpture the tone has been turned off
(in camera parameters), we can add more to the skintone by using colorbalance and saturation. Sometimes we have to select only the face area with a soft feather, and beef up just the face.
Although skintones 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 skintones.
Note the image above. The color picker was placed in the forehead area. Note the ratio of red, green and blue.
