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.

[Hephaestos]

Went through my standard routine on this one, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; I think it may have worked this time.

Levels on each of R, G and B, bringing the sliders on each to where the histogram starts rising from the deck. This cleared most of the problem.

Then I sampled from the whites of her eyes with the dropper, should be white (gray) but came up with red too high and blue a bit too low, so I evened these up by adjusting the brightness on the separate channels.

[Gary Richardson]

Thanks Janet, I was just looking for a quick, simple way to do this by the numbers. Usually I work by eye.

[Rexx]

Thanks, thanks and thanks!

Here, I snore away while you're all hard at work

First, about my setup. I'm on MacOS X with a rather expensive Viewsonic VX-2000 monitor. You Mac users out there know you can calibrate it with an OS utility, which is what I've done. My white point is D65, 6500 K, and I use a PC gamma of 2.2 instead of the Mac Gamma of 1.8. A couple of weeks from now I will get a real Gretag bug to hang on the monitor :-)

I changed my gamma from the standard 1.8 Mac setting to the standard Win 2.2 setting after looking at some of my images on the peecees at work. Ghastly, washed-out.

I can easily see all of the stepwedge on top of this window, except I have to look hard to see the difference between the two leftmost samples. It's morning here now and the sun is in my back; will soon reach my monitor.

As to the results of your labour I am very grateful for all the tips regarding workflow and especially the flesh tone swatch. I'll have to look around for it. Several of you reached an "almost" good result with only a few steps, where I had used 2-3 hours.

It is unfair to name a "winner", but I can tell you how it looks on my monitor in order of posting, which is totally subjective. I think that all of those who haven't tried to repair the red channel, will get an overexposed looking result?

I hope you all understand that my comments are not meant as critique, but only how my "colour-blind" eyes see the result on my monitor. I am really really not good at colours, honestly!

Original
Yellow and flat, but great eyes!

Stroker
Almost. Slightly overexposed, but then again, the original red channel is severely blown. I'm amazed at how quickly Stroker could "get there".

Janet
Red, overexposed

Ken
Is that red or is it cyan? Sunburn, at least. Overexposed

Duv
#1 The winner. #2 No, too much ... cyan? And you found BLACK!

Gary
Looks more overexposed than any of the rest. Are you a 1.8 Gamma guy?

Hephaestos
I think the colours might have been good, had it not been so overexposed. Another Mac user?

I promised my wife I would only spend two hours on this image. I think I'll tell her that I really meant two hours per day...

The sun reached my monitor now, so I cannot do any "real" work for some time, but I will check out all of your tips. If I ever reach a result that I'm happy with.... I will post it here. It might be interesting to hear how it will look on your monitors.

Again, thanks folks!

[philbach]

Well the results are so so but the technique was fast.

1.) Copy the BackGround Layer

2.) Adjustment Levels. Black eyedropper on the left pupil and white
eyedropper on the highlight (light reflection) on the right eye (iris).

3.) Image Adjustments/ Auto Color

[Stroker]

I don't mind critiques. Like you said, subjective.
Personally, I don't have eyes for this kind of thing.
Well, I do, but not anywhere near as critical like a real photographer.
It easy for me to wash-out a photo or pump up the contrast too much.

To fix the over-exposure in mine, I would just go to the Lum/Curves and tweak the Curves a bit more. Probably make it more of an 'S' shape.

Don't forget that the middle slider in Levels is a gamma slider.
Might help. I don't know.

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Rex, I'm working on an LCD screen at the moment. There was a little outside light on the screen when I worked on your image, I think thats what's thrown things. I've upped contrast a little, and dimmed exposure, how does this one post?

[Hephaestos]

Hi Rexx!

Originally Posted by Rexx

Hephaestos
I think the colours might have been good, had it not been so overexposed. Another Mac user?

Yes I am on a Mac. And I've been having some issues with monitor calibration, which is one reason I submitted to this, to see how far off it really is. I really don't have a knack for getting it right I'm afraid.

You're also right about the red channel in the original having too much 255 in it; I didn't even notice on the first go-around. I'll fool with it some more today with that in mind.

[byRo]

I was going to apply my little Color-Declipping tutorial (which I think would be regarded here as cheating) but in the process I observed that the colour problems are different in the light and dark regions. The lights being too yellow and the darks being too red. That way it's difficult to apply a general fix to the image.

(Disclaimer - I am not a colour expert)- Applied channel mixer with 20/80/-10 monochrome to get a good greyscale image;
- Mixed this back in as luminosity;
- Selected luminosity (<ctrl><alt><~>) and used as mask for a Hue/Saturation layer, selected "yellows" and eye-dropped from the bright forehead, set Hue -10 and Saturation -10;
- Copied this layer, inverted the mask, cleared the settings <alt><Reset>, selected Reds and eye-dropped from the red shadows, set Hue +20, saturation -30 (thus balancing light/dark areas);
- Added another H/S layer, without a mask, setting Hue -7, saturation -22;
- Levels layer, Auto "Enhance per channel contrast", backed off opacity to 60%;
- byRo Brightness/Contrast, brightness -10 contrast +10.

Phew!
Rô

[Rexx]

I also have this 3%-5% Yellow over Magenta in the book in front of me, but I cannot for the life of me make this happen. Whenever I adjust a curve or three so that this ratio is getting close, the face looks like something out of a horror movie.

As I said, I have some good shots of her daughter in sunshine. I pulled them up side by side, and even if the readouts were close, the daughter looked lovely and the mother ... well...

Apart from all the jokes you can make on that one, I started looking at the background. The daughter was shot against a blue autumn sky, whilst the mother had this absolutely incredibly ugly wall behind her.

So I changed the colour of the wall... That did the trick.

My steps.
1) Noise Ninja on Blue channel only
2) Noise Ninja again on all channels
3) Paint away slits in ugly wall
4) Repair Red channel as 70% Red, 20% Green to gain some contrast
5) Reduce Green and Blue to 90% as well
6) Use Levels to balance RGB slightly
7) Hue/Sat with a Mask to de-sat hair and other dark areas. Too red
8) Fake shadow on wall, using adj level and mask
9) Slight Hue/Sat correction
10) Tiny masked adj layer to brighten up green eye in the shade
11) Curves for a slightly darker image
12) Hue/Sat to change colour of abominable wall

All of the above in separate layers of course. No USM.

This will not make it to the cover of Vogue, but considering the rather hopeless starting point, I think this is not too bad. Interestingly, the flesh tones are not what the book says they should be, but on my monitor, this looks ok.

Lessons learned:
- Levels are also useful, not only Curves
- CMYK flesh values are not hewn in stone
- Background severely corrupts your colour sight
- Stick to sunlight or flash

Now how does this look on your monitors?

A heartfelt Thank You! to all who volunteered to help. I was going to give up, but then I saw what could be achieved.

[Rexx]

Aha. It was too large. Re-compress...

[byRo]

Originally Posted by Rexx

Lessons learned:
...- CMYK flesh values are not hewn in stone
....

To me that's the most important. Must be one of those things our little brains do automatically when we look at an image. Doesn't matter much what the numbers say - if it looks wrong, it is wrong.

Thanks Rexx for an interesting thread.
Rô

[Hephaestos]

Just finished recalibrating my monitor, and Rexx's second attempt looks way too dark on it. (The option for "native gamma" came up as 2.1, so I went with that.) I put a screen layer copy on top, and it looked better to me.

Going by what Ro noticed, I then used color balance to bump the red down on shadows and the yellow down on highlights. Also bumped red and green down in the midtones. Does this look as bad on other people's monitors as I suspect it does?

[Rexx]

Originally Posted by Hephaestos

Just finished recalibrating my monitor, and Rexx's second attempt looks way too dark on it.

This has also struck me. I think every attempt here has looked too bright! But when looking at other faces I have shot, even from that same evening, same camera, they all look lighter.

Originally Posted by Hephaestos

I put a screen layer copy on top, and it looked better to me.

Yes, my standard trick for exposure compensation.

Originally Posted by Hephaestos

Does this look as bad on other people's monitors as I suspect it does?

Yes
It looks blue here. But I think the main reason for that is her hair. I took care to desat the hair. When you tweaked the overall colour balance you must have re-introduced colour (blue) to her hair. But her lips look violet. That cannot be right?

I think it's time I get that Gretag bug... My colleague discovered a course on colour management, and the bug goes with it.

[venivedi]

I just want to participate.

[Rexx]

Originally Posted by venivedi

I just want to participate.

Seoul... you're 10? hours ahead of me. Haven't you gone to bed yet or are you up extremely early?

Apart from that, you're apparently the only one around here with a monitor calibrated the same as mine. That one looks better than mine! You were able to preserve the structure of the skin. This looks real!

What about a short narrative?