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What's your best way to fix skin tones?
Hi all, I just skipped through some photo retouching work in this forum and i've seen some amazing work  I'm a photo retoucher as well but sometimes i still struggle with finding the best way to adjust skin tones and make them look natural. I think i haven't found the best way yet... What are your ways and tipps to fix skin tones? Are there any filters or photoshop actions you can recommend? I would be very thankful to learn from you and maybe even see some photo examples... Many thanks, Nadine Aug 10 09 06:50 am Link When you find one, let me know. I feel the same way. I am going to have to keep any eye on this post because someone might have figure out what to do every time. QC Cong www.xophotography.net Aug 10 09 06:56 am Link XO Photography wrote: +1 Aug 10 09 07:02 am Link Looks like the skin tone questions is one of the hardest in the photo retouching field What technique do you use at the moment? I generally use the "selective colour correction" or reduce the saturation a little... Aug 10 09 07:03 am Link It's not good perhaps .. but for a generic fix .. my default approach would be to reduce the red and yellow saturations a bit .. selective colors are sometimes also useful. Aug 10 09 07:16 am Link One step in the process I use is a plug in called ASF Digital Airbrush Pro. It is a company now owned by Kodak. It's about $100. It has a percentage scale to smooth skin. If you want the Barbie doll plastic effect then use 100%, if you want to keep it looking real then about 30% works. It preserves skin texture to a great extent. To avoid cotton candy hair you must lasso all skin areas first so that the filter only affects the skin areas and not clothing, backgrounds and especially hair. I like to keep it looking real and plausible. BTW, I do this without layers (I know, I know, I should be using layers much more.) Aug 10 09 07:27 am Link @ William Jay Thanks for your reply. Your technique is more for skin smoothing isn't it? I'm more interested in how to create great and natural looking skin tones... Thanks still Aug 10 09 09:16 am Link You read more into my answer than was there. The step I mentioned is not the only thing I do to skin. I commented that it helped preserve skin texture, an important ingredient in skin color tone also. If the lighting used is not custom white balanced in camera for complete color tonal range then there will be a problem that has to be addressed in PP. A professional MUA can go a long way to lessening this problem also. You have a couple examples of before and after in your port where you did a wonderful job of adjusting color tone that gave the model much more pleasing skin color. I think we are on the same course to wonderfully balanced skin tones. Whatever steps you are using certainly are working! Aug 10 09 11:56 am Link There are some really good books for the retouching of skin. I personally use the curves adjustment layer to correct skin color, and if there are some patches of redness I can use the select> color range to grab them and bring them down a bit to more of a natural color using curves again. - Phen Aug 10 09 12:20 pm Link Ive been constantly searching as well. Getting the skin looking naturally blemish free is fairly straight forward using the healing brush for a natural look at stage one. For a more idealized look, smoothing and blending and color harmonizing the skin colors and the surface with the equivalent of electronic foundation (surface blur) is also good. But... for the more detailed and natural looks in a reasonable amount of time....time ive had to resort to taking skin pores off of one perfect model... and then transferring them to the model im working on presently. Ive got a library of skin pore textures saved up over time that allows me to add the skin pore textures back into areas that I have had to smudge, or to clone out, or to fix up. It makes the smoothed over area look natural again because there are visible pores back in the covered up part. Its a marvelous compromise...who wants to spend 2-6 hours doing a dodge and burn to every good looking image in your shop. The trend is that fewer have the budget or the large block of time for a pristine treatment these days. Ray Aug 10 09 01:00 pm Link I zoom in to 100% and then just go over every single pixel of skin surface with heal brush, patch tool, and clone brush (with transparency) and fix it. It's time consuming but the short cuts don't cut it. Aug 10 09 01:16 pm Link Delicate Editing wrote: Aug 20 09 08:11 pm Link Marcus J. Ranum wrote: I do this in combination with dodge and burn, but usually at 200-400%. The healing brush, clone tool and patch tool will take care of blemishes, but if you want to take care of evening out skin tone you have more limited options. For me DB is the best. I do this on a pixel level as well as over the whole image. Painting the skin to even out tones and give a different lighting so the face doesn't look so flat is really important to me. Sometimes you'll find that after pixel DB you have one even tone, but you want to add more dimension to the lighting. Aug 20 09 08:27 pm Link I usually do it by eye. Once you do it for a while you can usually pick out exactly whats wrong with the image. Every image is different, so theres no real way to say "just slide down the red" or "reduce opacity" because some images will have to much magenta, some will have too little yellow, etc. Just keep MM open to a good photographer's page while you adjust and see if your edit looks "real" in terms of skin tone. if it looks out of place keep trying. Aug 20 09 08:36 pm Link sort of a global color reset..? when i'm in a hurry i make a new adjustment layer and grab the grey eye dropper. i click around until i find a place that sets a nice skin tone rather than messing with sliders endlessly...it turns out to be fairly efficient once you start looking in the right areas (if it's not a raw file). i wish every digital photo had the artwork color bar embedded in the frame so you could pop out and do a quick color match for red, blue, whatever... Aug 20 09 08:37 pm Link I like to separate the detail from the overall tones/values, then use portraiture plugin on a duplicate of the tones/values layer, then invert the mask and paint it on to the areas that need work. This just took a couple minutes, and I was trying to keep it as natural as possible (I also did some quick cloning on the detail layer). You could make the skin tones much more even, but it starts looking fake. If they're paying enough, pixel level dodge and burn will give you superior results. Aug 21 09 12:36 am Link For me it starts with your RAW stage and ends with use of colour balance, selective colour, working with brightness and tones, saturation and vibrance etc... The most common thing I see if too brown/yellow and too high saturation. This image is meant to be fairly cold in tone btw.. I think this is one of the more "natural" skin tone looks that I have produced, although obviously pictures look different on different monitors... (so not asking for a crit on this  ) In the end, you need a well calibrated monitor, a good eye and the tools to accurately change the image in the way you need to.  Aug 21 09 01:55 am Link Here's a critique whether you like it or not: It's spectacular! It's making my non-color corrected post look eye-bleedingly orange/red. Love how you've gone with the powerful lip and natural eye. I see lot's of retouchers throwing both a dramatic eye and lip onto retouches even though the MUA kept one or the other natural, and it looks tacky. Aug 21 09 02:31 am Link I start with a separation as outlined in the Highpass Thread and even out the skin tones on the Low Frequency layer. This gets rid of a lot of the blotchiness. Then I clone any detail that went missing on the High Frequency layer where needed. Then I'll adjust for contrast and while I'm doing that I'll set up a curves and a hue/saturation layer. Sometimes more than one of each. I'll go one at a time with them and adjust each one until the areas with bad tones look right. Then I invert the mask and paint back in with low opacity brush on the mask. If it still doesn't look quite right, I go to the next adjustment layer and do some more. I also like to use a color balance layer for overall tones. Aug 21 09 02:52 am Link Yeah, that's very similar to my workflow. Although it's not really about the tones of the skin but the values, I like to dodge and burn on the coarse detail (low frequency) layer to enhance the contouring. Might as well while you're there, right? Aug 21 09 03:03 am Link There's something called a gray card... it's even more effective if you can figure out what "custom white balance" means... makeup artists are essential... oh, and shoot models from Elite Aug 21 09 03:08 am Link nevermind Aug 21 09 03:13 am Link Brett Michael Nelson wrote: In my experience grey cards can be good, but they won't get you *good skin tones*. That's down to the retouch and careful balance of tones, red, green and blue (or whatever) in the highlights, midtones and shadows separately, plus a lot of other stuff. It's a starting point, but it will only get you 40% of the way there. The sublety is in more than just white balance. Aug 21 09 03:53 am Link Phil Drinkwater wrote: This not correct, custom white balance is really the only way to get proper color, without a color meter and exact color temp. Aug 21 09 04:06 am Link Phil Drinkwater wrote: Kevin Russo Photography wrote: I think we're failing to adequately differentiate between a gray / GM card and a custom white balance. A gray / GM card will allow you to set perfect scene neutrality in post without any loss of quality or color profiling, while a custom white balance will set the gray value at the time of capture. Only when shooting JPEG is there a quality difference between them, otherwise it's simply a personal workflow question. Aug 21 09 04:14 am Link Michelle Ames wrote: Mines very similar to this, except I'll "selective colour" areas and give them their own layers so each can be edited individually. Surface blur then high pass filters after. This is after the tedious clone/heal brush at around 200-400% depending on the areas. The curves is so handy especially if you fill the mask with black for taking out shadows/add highlights. Aug 21 09 04:33 am Link Kevin Russo Photography wrote: Confused... Do you mean that the eye dropper in a RAW processor will not do the same job as "custom white balance" in your camera? If so, I suspect you're incorrect... Aug 21 09 04:41 am Link Phil Drinkwater wrote: Try it yourself, there is a difference. You can decide which one you like better. Aug 21 09 04:44 am Link Kevin Russo Photography wrote: Again Kevin, there is no difference. The data are identical whether the WB is set in camera or in post. The only way you may see one is if you're using a RAW converter which doesn't allow adjustment of the M / G casts, in which case you can see a considerable shift. LR allows for one allows making this adjustment and as such produces identical results. Aug 21 09 04:48 am Link Kevin Russo Photography wrote: Then I assume you mean the eye dropper in RAW vs. the custom white balance setting in camera. I suppose some camera might have a poor custom white balance function which could explain the difference? Nikons might get it spot on but Canons might be a bit out for example. But the RAW processor will do the same for all types and models of camera, and it should be accurate... Aug 21 09 04:50 am Link Delicate Editing wrote: The subject most likely makes photographers weak in the knees. I guess 90% of all customer complaints are related to skin tones. Aug 21 09 01:01 pm Link I can't say it's the "Best" way but this is my method: 1st step in processing any image is to assure correct color balance which includes skin. To do this I ad a threshold layer and push it all the way to black util the smallest spec of black I can possibly use is visible. I then control click with the dropper tomark that spot, reverse the process and do the same with the white point. Discard the layer leaving the marks behind and add a curves layer. Using the marked black point & white point I set the curves with the samplers and then flatten the image before using my standard action to prepare it for editing. Using this method you are guaranteed of a perfect color balance every time. I then cheat a bit using Imogenics Portraiture plug-in with my own customized settings in a group where I combine the basic portrait settings (tweaked of course) and the glamor settings (again tweaked) into a group. I fade the opacity of the glamor layer to between 2-40% to taste and then merge the group. Clean up using masks on the layers and the group itself, andthen merge the group and fade it's opacity to taste. From there you can tweak things. My preferred method of dealing with skin tones is to have a hues/saturation layer with a mask. I desaturate between 10 & 20 and then restore the color to the eyes, lips, hair, makeup,& clothing by brushing the mask with at 20% flow / 20% opacity to restore the saturation in those areas to taste. Textures are maintained in the skin by my initial setup action which utilizes an LAB sharpen to avoid screwing with the color. Aug 21 09 01:50 pm Link Woah, what are you all doing to your photos? All I do is throw a curves layer on top of the photo and use selective color to remove reds. Occasionally I'll color correct with a gray card. I never d&b past 100%, I rarely even go past 70%. And I rarely use the healing tool. Aug 21 09 02:24 pm Link Delicate Editing wrote: I feel that most responses have misunderstood the OP question. He is asking for Skin Tones not skin smoothing techniques. Aug 21 09 02:35 pm Link Aphoristic Precise wrote: Wow, first time I hear this... I envy that you work with models with perfect skin Aug 21 09 02:51 pm Link Rafael Telles wrote: In comparison to those who use nothing BUT the healing tool, I meant! For moles, nothing else. Aug 21 09 04:11 pm Link I got this link in an email a while ago, it can be helpful, although I find it can also be very hit-or-miss. It's worth a try. http://digital-photography-school.com/p … ill-layers Aug 21 09 05:51 pm Link mikedimples wrote: Yes, I do that too. It seems easier that way. No need to worry about messing up the details or at least less chance of it. Aug 21 09 06:26 pm Link |
