Seriously Superficial wrote:
I did a group portrait last week. One of the four people had a pretty red face from being out in the sun too long the day before.

I played around with an adjustment layer, lowered the red in color balance and used a mask to blend in his face with less redness. But I'm not really happy with the result.

Is there a better method to deal with this?

Thanks

Did you try saturation instead of or as well as colour balance? And usually the face will be darker, so a levels adjustment too is necessary.This usually works much better in Lab mode, so you could try going to Lab mode, adjusting the saturation and colour balance, then back into RGB.

Seriously Superficial wrote:
I did a group portrait last week. One of the four people had a pretty red face from being out in the sun too long the day before.

I played around with an adjustment layer, lowered the red in color balance and used a mask to blend in his face with less redness. But I'm not really happy with the result.

Is there a better method to deal with this?

Thanks

Keep it. If they were red, they were red. You're trying to capture a moment in time.

re- photography wrote:
Did they specifically ask you to change the color of the person's skin? I mean, if the lighting is neutrally balanced, and other people and things in the scene look correct, I wouldn't change the fact that one person looks sunburnt when they were in fact sunburnt unless I was asked to do it.

Yes, they asked.

re- photography wrote:
Did they specifically ask you to change the color of the person's skin? I mean, if the lighting is neutrally balanced, and other people and things in the scene look correct, I wouldn't change the fact that one person looks sunburnt when they were in fact sunburnt unless I was asked to do it.

I agree! If they ask, then yes change it, but otherwise I would keep it. They did know about their photo shoot? Did they not?

MEK Photography wrote:
Try the Lee Varis method from "Skin"

Open a HSL layer. 

Choose the red chanel from the drop down

using the normal eye dropper, sample from the reddest of the red area.

then use the negative dropper and sample a normal colored area of skin to exclude this from the adjustment.

Slide the hue slider all the way to the left (-180, I think) so most everything goes blue.  The blue areas are the range of red that you selected.

Now take the right triangular tonal range slider on the tone scale, and slide it to the left to fine tune what range of red you want to adjust.  You'll see the blue areas starting to shrink.

Now go back to the hue slider and bring it back right of center (usually between +5 and +12 should due).  This adjusts the reds that you've just selected, adding a little more yellow.

Bring the lightness slider up a tiny bit to taste. 

Then go back and mask for the areas you want to adjust, making sure to keep the lips and such masked out. 


This is a rough method, but works fairly well for images that in all likelihood won't be viewed extremely large (as in a shot with 4 people in it...)

I prefer this method....or one very similar. It works surprisingly well and is fairly quick to do.

Evocative Images wrote:
The OP isn't asking for your opinion on whether the image should be adjusted, it's a technical question about how. Better to assume the decision of why has been resolved.

It's a forum; I'll give my opinion whether it's asked or not!

Photography by J wrote:
My preferred method, FWIW, is to use a selective color adjustment layer...

My most common approach for sunburn or over-exertion redness is Selective Color, and remove Magenta from the Reds. It often fixes the problem without having a visible impact on the rest of the image--meaning it doesn't need to be masked. That makes it suitable for batch processing of picnic photos.

For fine-tuning, obviously, more care can be taken, but it really works well in a lot of situations.

Kevin_Connery wrote:

My most common approach for sunburn or over-exertion redness is Selective Color, and remove Magenta from the Reds. It often fixes the problem without having a visible impact on the rest of the image--meaning it doesn't need to be masked. That makes it suitable for batch processing of picnic photos.

For fine-tuning, obviously, more care can be taken, but it really works well in a lot of situations.

hmmm...  I'll have to try that...


Mike Kalcevic
MEK Photography