Board index Photography Artistic Questions Suggestions on Skintone

Artistic Questions

Suggestions on Skintone

Discuss style and artistic aspects of photography
atkelley
 
Posts: 25

Suggestions on Skintone

Post Thu Jun 26, 2008 11:31 pm


I took these pictures of my daughter and the skin tone looks awful. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what they believe I did incorrectly so that I can try to fix it? I haven't had her pictures do this beofre and I was a little bummed out. It was my first night with a new camera and a new lens. This is one of them: http://www.pbase.com/atkelley/image/96402414




I also had these that I took for a friend. When they came back in a 10x13 her skin really did not look right to me but I just can't put my finger on it:

http://www.pbase.com/atkelley/image/95845911

Thanks for any help,
April

carrozza
 
Posts: 2

Re: Suggestions on Skintone

Post Tue Jul 01, 2008 4:23 pm


Presuming your monitor has been recently calibrated I would say the skin tone problem can be easily corrected. You can use a gray card or filter to adjust your camera's custom white balance for the light you are shooting under. I have used both with pleasing results. I shoot in RAW so I have even more white balance flexibility if needed.

http://www.adorama.com/Search-Results.tpl?page=searchresults&searchinfo=white%20balance

Walgreens pharmacies has a lens cleaning cloth that just happens to be 18% gray, fits in your pocket, and works very well to set white balance for less that $4.00.

atkelley
 
Posts: 25

Re: Suggestions on Skintone

Post Wed Jul 02, 2008 12:48 pm


No problem. I do have a gray card. I used it on my maternity pictures and loved how they turned out. But on my session following and the one of my daughter I completely forgot to use it. Wow, I never relized how very important it can be. Thank you for pointing this out. I will make sure it stays at the top of my thought list.

I am also working on telling my camera to focus on the eyes.

I'm going to practice with these 2 things more and see how I do.

Thanks guys!!

louann108
 
Posts: 11

Re: Suggestions on Skintone

Post Fri Jul 11, 2008 4:08 am


On some of your daughter, some cyan adjusting might balance it out, but the unevenness is just how the skin is-Nik has a great edit filter called "Dynamic Skin Softner" that smooths skin out. With the couple, a lot of retouching is needed. She has dark circles under her eyes and his face is very red and uneven. Cloning under her eyes at a 50% opacity will help the circles, blur tool at 50% might help his along with cloning and using the brush tool set to 'color' at about 45% opacity and flow with a beige or fleshtone as your color selection.

atkelley
 
Posts: 25

Re: Suggestions on Skintone

Post Fri Jul 11, 2008 12:28 pm


LouAnn,
I will do my homework to learn more about the things you have mentioned. Thank you for taking the time to look at my pictures, as I am trying really hard to improve them.

olafdk
 
Posts: 103

Re: Suggestions on Skintone

Post Sun Aug 03, 2008 2:49 am


I played a little bit with your photograph in Photoshop. I started by removing the runaway dot of lipstic and a few other imperfections. To get more pleasing skin tones, first I tried to get the white balance correct, using a curves adjustment layer: I used the highlight picker on the background and it seemed to go in the right direction, but it got a little overdone, so I turned down the opacity of the layer to 50%. Skin tones still needed some improvement so I used a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer with the following settings: Hue=+5 (removing some of the magenta), Saturation=-10, and Lightness=+5. I did this selectively on the skin mainly, using the mask on the adjustment layer. To finish up I did some selective sharpening on the eyes and finally some brightening and increase of contrast on the eyes with another curves adjustment layer.

http://www.pbase.com/olafdk/image/101107895/original.jpg

I'll keep the high-res, layered psd-file, for a while, in case you're interested...
Olaf.dk

khun_k
 
Posts: 29
Location: Bangkok, Shanghai

Re: Suggestions on Skintone

Post Mon Aug 04, 2008 7:41 am


skin color is very difficult issue, I believe no one is right enough. It is a matter of taste, and is subjective. With very careful calibration, the high end digital capture can re-produce very faithful skin tones, but sometimes artist like to add a little touch on the skin tone to make it as a part of artistry presentation, or to harmonize into the ambient mood, we can't say they are not right, it is quite subjective. And most important thing of all, as long as a final image looks beautiful, it is beautiful, I guessed there is little people to go to museum to try to find out if anyone's artwork is in wrong color or false skin tone.
The best way I learned, is to shoot raw and if possible, use a grey card to shoot along with the subject as a natural reference and use the color reference to get the nature color using the color picker from the software. It has too much to do with all the lighting and consistency of lighting, natural or artificial or mixed, but it is a good start. When you can make it look right, then you can try to work further on your raw converter to try to get what looks better for you and improve from there. In the digital age and with all the software available and many camera offer raw ability, anyone can be their own teacher. And you need to feel good about your picture, not to rely on too much voice from others.


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