Flesh tone experts - help!

[Rexx]

I surrender. I give up.

The enclosed picture was shot under horrible fluorescent light and incredibly ugly walls. The camera (in this case a Canon 10D) has blown the red channel over most of the face.

What I've tried:
Reconstruct the Red channel from approx 75% R, 10% G.
All sorts of Levels, Curves, Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, Overlay, Multiply, Screen, Masks...

There is no way I can get this face to take on a natural flesh colour! Whatever I try looks grossly unnatural to me. I am not good with colours, sigh. Usually there is some grey spot for adjusting WB. Not here.

She is an average Northern European woman, in other words, fair skin. Her husband says her eyes are a dark green, but the way the light comes here, I guess "any green" will do.

Please!!??

[Stroker]

Shifted hue about -7.
Tweaked the saturation with Curves.
And messed with the luminosity a little bit.

Not sure about when I'll be able to post more details about what I did.

[Janet Petty]

I'm by no means a color expert but I had to try this just to see if it could be done.

I used levels to do the major adjust. The blue channel was the one with the problem. Once it was adjusted, everything else pretty much fell into place and only needed minor adjustments with hue/sat. The numbers I got in the finished picture looked pretty good, so here it is.

Janet

[Ken Fournelle]

Nice work Janet!

My quick try:

1. Duplicated the background layer
2. Ran Levels Adj. Layer on each channel
3. Curves Adjustment Layer
4. Color Balance Adj. Layer
5. Selective Color Adj. Layer--to reduce the yellow
6. Empty Layer set to Color Blend Mode, sampled some good flesh tone and painted with a soft brush @ 10-20% opacity
7. Empty Layer set to Softlight Blend Mode, soft black brush @ 10-30% opacity
8. Empty Layer with the Healing brush to reduce the shine and highlights and to perk up her eyes.
9. Flattened and applied USM

K

[Rexx]

Originally Posted by Stroker

Shifted hue about -7.
Tweaked the saturation with Curves.
And messed with the luminosity a little bit.

Not sure about when I'll be able to post more details about what I did.

Not bad at all! Now if only "tweak" and "mess" colud be quantified...

[Rexx]

Originally Posted by Janet Petty

Oh DRAT, the post is really red. Doesn't look red on my monitor and the numbers were ok. Guess it is back to the drawing board for a few more tries. BRB.

Right. Been there, done that. Again and again...
Exactly what I got too.

[Rexx]

Originally Posted by Ken Fournelle

6. Empty Layer set to Color Blend Mode, sampled some good flesh tone and painted with a soft brush @ 10-20% opacity

Aha! I have some good sunshine head shots of her daughter...

Your result looks too red on my monitor.

[Rexx]

Originally Posted by Janet Petty

The blue channel was the one with the problem.

The red channel is blown. The blue channel is very noisy. In the area that has been cropped away, there is severe noise banding. 1600 ISO.

[Ken Fournelle]

Rexx,

The posting matches my monitor. mmmmm? It may be a bit too much on the magenta side though. I think I could make it a bit "flatter" and put in some flesh tone colors from the Skin Tones Color Chart stored elsewhere on this site.

K

[Stroker]

Not bad at all! Now if only "tweak" and "mess" colud be quantified...

Bah! Bleh!

I'm a big fan of tearing photos apart in various ways. One of my favorite ways is Hue, Saturation, and Luminosity.

If you have PC/Win, I have some simple plug-ins to help with this: http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/software/9839-pc-win-silly-lil-plugs-stroker-style.html

Or I can show how to use stock tools to do those things.

Hue
Extract Hue to colour (probably not necessary for this photo, but I generally do it anyways).
My general rule for this is fleshtones are red/orange and maybe a hint of yellow.
That is my starting point.
Far too much yellow and needs to be shifted a bit more towards red.
Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation
and use Hue to around -7 or so.
Doesn't take much.

Saturation
Extract the saturation to the Red channel in Channels palette.
Green and Blue channels are black.
Clip a Curves adjustment layer, use drop-down to go to Red channel, and tweak away.
My general rule for this kind of photo is that saturation should be under 50%.
That is my starting point.
For the given photo, I think sat is way to high and tweak it down with Curves in the Red channel.
Then I tweaked the low sats a little more.

Luminosity
Extract the luminosity, clip a Curves adjustment layer, and tweak away.

Ah...

---Curves ad-layer to tweak Lum, clipping group
-Extracted Luminosity set to Luminosity blending mode
---Curves ad-layer with tweaks in Red channel, clipping group
-Extracted Saturation in Red channel set to Saturation blending mode
-Hue/Sat ad-layer with Hue = -7
-Original photo

That's my general flow and it works very well for me for a wide range of 'bad' photos.

[Duv]

On mine, I balance the only known true black area, the pupil to about 22 for R,G & B. Changed to LAB and curved the Luminosity channel down to give the image more depth and increase the Cyan value in the process. Sharpened 200/.8/0. Back in RGB mode made a Curves adjustment layer and raised the blue curve.
Finally adjusted red and green channels until I got Magenta and Yellow values at around 30 with Yellow a few percentages higher and Cyan at about 5%. Skin withOUT a bit of cyan just doesn't look natural to me.

Personally I'm happier with the second one. It has considerably more magenta to it but the skin tone certainly seems to go better with the green eyes.

Cheers
Dave

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Rex, had a go with your image as follows.

Duplicated layer.
Placed Sample tool on mid toned skin area and noted readings for R,G and B.
Opened Skin Sample Swatch. This is available in Resources section here at RP. (at least I think that's where I got it.)
Sampled suitable skin tone, and noted R, G and B settings.
Created new levels adjustment layer and altered mid slider on R, G and B channels till readings on mid tone skin area were equal to those of the sample taken from the swatch.

Tweaked general levels a touch, and created hue/sat adjust layer then dropped sat by about 5.

[Janet Petty]

Duv and Gary...WOW. I bow to perfection. Either and/or both couldn't get much better.

Janet

[Duv]

Thanks Janet. I just edited my post to include a second rendition. Can you look at it and tell me which one you prefer?

Thanks
Dave

[Janet Petty]

The first one.