Correcting skin tones after the fact

*dkittle* · 08-25-2008, 11:42 AM

So, I went out to an old part of town with a cluster of brick buildings. One area we were in had a lot of light reflecting off of the brick which caused a muddy, reddy-brown cast on the model's skin (see pic below, unprocessed except to convert from RAW to jpeg).

I use Lightroom and Photoshop, but prefer to stay in Lightroom as much as possible.

My question is about trying to bring the skin tone back to normal. Do you end up just eyeballing it while playing with curves or levels? What tricks to you use to get people with bizarre skin tones back to looking human again? :-)

Thanks for any advise you might have.
Don

*Clicker* · 08-25-2008, 01:31 PM

1st, i worked it in LR, then i fine tuned it in PS to what i like...

I mostly worked the tint/hue, colour temperature and fill light...i "cooled" yours down i could warm it up a touch but i think i see this as "neutral"...with my eyes right now.

*dkittle* · 08-25-2008, 01:33 PM

Hey Clicker, do you remember what you did?

*Clicker* · 08-25-2008, 01:55 PM

Your photo posted here...

LR custom exposure 2 stops down, then final edit in PS where i just increased brightness to +56

and this might be what you're looking for..."warm" in keeping with your bright sunshine day

Gooshin · 08-25-2008, 03:11 PM

i usualy eyeball it

however i use many ways of doing it

sometimes hitting the "auto" WB is enough

sometimes i play around with the saturation slider, -5 ~ 7 points is usualy enough to "normalize" the image

sometimes i'll go into the individual colours and desaturize the orange and yellow bars by 5-10 points to get rid of that orangie tint

if i'm brave i'll manualy start sliding the temperature bar and tint bars until i get it to how i want it

sometimes i'll use all 4 if the picture is really ****ed up.

krypticide · 08-25-2008, 05:31 PM

Thank goodness I'm colorblind so I can't see the red-shift...

song_hm · 08-25-2008, 10:19 PM

I assume from your title that RAW file is not available. My usual workflow would involve doing a base line Level layer with auto Snap to Neutral Tone set, and then tweak each channel in the Level dialog. If this does not work, redo the same steps on a selection that include skin and hair.

Here is a quick application of that 2nd workflow. The blue highlight still need selective toning down, but the red cast on the skin from the brick is now reduced.

*dkittle* · 08-26-2008, 09:28 AM

Actually, Song_hm, the RAW is always available :-)

I played with whitebalance last night, I'll try levels and curves tonight and see where that gets me.

Thanks!

Gooshin · 08-26-2008, 09:49 AM

the problem with auto-white balance in photoshop/lightroom is that when the entire photo is skewed because of the ambient lighting, it is very difficult to get back to ground zero

because if the bricks were orange and her skin is tanned and it was all a big mess of a brownish light, then probably you are going to sacrafice the true colour of the bricks if you get back a natural skin tone, which is okay, since no one ever really cares about the bricks anyway.

rparmar · 08-26-2008, 01:55 PM

I prefer the original, perhaps with the red tuned down a tad.

White balance is just a guide, not a rule. Some shots look better with a cast or particular hues emphasised.

*khardur* · 08-26-2008, 06:45 PM

Originally Posted by rparmar

White balance is just a guide, not a rule. Some shots look better with a cast or particular hues emphasised.

agree on that point.
The "corrected" one actually looks a tad too cool for my taste.

MrApollinax · 08-26-2008, 07:11 PM

Here is my go at it using Lightzone's WB tool. I zoomed in on the model's eyes and used the eyedrop selection to choose the shade of white I wanted to use as the neutral color. Personally I liked the red cast so i went with a very slight change to tone down the red cast to get this output. If I had access to the RAW file I could probably do a little more. This correction took all of 10 sec. in Lightzone.