About Skin Tone

[Hello_taipan]

Hi all,

been trying to concentrate on a particular problem today: Even skin tone !
Thanks to my poor technique in photography, i got a nice blotchy skin to practice on !

After many hours reading all possible posts about it, i tried different techniques (without success):

-selective color
-color balance
-hue/sat
-Select>Color Range
-Calculations
-Apply Image
-Curves on specific channel
-channel mixer
-Painting on neutral layer (katrin Eismann's book)
-Painting on color moded layer (vikky hansen's tuto)

SOoo.... what am i missing here..? i got the feeling the tools r right but i can't seem to figure out when and how to apply them...

the pic:

[Daviskw]

Hi there

My example is a little over done... but check out the tutorials for the degrunge routine.
It does a good job of evening tone while leaving most of the detail.

Butch

[Hello_taipan]

hi butch,
thanx for ur time, i thought about the degrunge also; but one thing i wanted to keep is the skin texture, which gets wiped out with degrunge... (well at least that's the problem i got...)

edit:
just notice part of my problem was lot of noise, i ran neat image, but still, i got some blotchy skin.

[Daviskw]

May I ask do you have an unaltered version... I only say this because the example you posted does not have any skin texture to begin with. I have found between degrunge and screen blur I can smooth almost any skin and still keep pore detail.. or I think i can...lol

Butch

[Hello_taipan]

Originally Posted by Daviskw

May I ask do you have an unaltered version... I only say this because the example you posted does not have any skin texture to begin with. I have found between degrunge and screen blur I can smooth almost any skin and still keep pore detail.. or I think i can...lol

Butch

hey butch thnx for ur help here.the thing is that yes, u do save some skin texture with degrunge, but on the other hand u do alter it also. im a true believer of D&B for the texture, cause there is absolutely no blur at all.
the next step is that skin tone i can't seem to figure out ..

[DCobb]

This is my try. Color correction in the LAB mode, sharpened the image a little, and airbrush. Lovely young lady. Good picture for practice.

dc

[mistermonday]

Alex, there are a few ways to approach this. If you examine the channels, her face is pretty even in the Red channel, worse in the green, and pretty bad in the blue. If I had a hi resolution good quality original, I would use a Noise Filter like noiseware to smooth out the noise without blurring the detail. Then I would have masked out her face and applied the Red channel to a duplicate layer and changed its blend mode to luminosity. From there I would add a blank layer set to Color blend mode and using a soft brush at 50% opacity, paint over her face by sampling adjacent color from the smooth and corrctly colored areas of skin.

However, given the image that you uploaded I took a different path.
I duplicated the background layer and applied a levels adjustment setting the B&W points (hair and her right shoulder). This will bright the image and smooth out the tone differences across the face. Next added a blank layer set to color blend mode and as described above, painted with a soft brush sampling from adjacent skin I felt had even color. This was quick and sloppy so pardon my spill over onto her shirt and hair.

Regards, Murray

[Cassidy]

This was predominantly about painting on a softlight layer with very very low opacity brush with both white and black and in some areas with sampled colour. Some of the colour was adjusted by using a colour layer and then the opacity lowered to taste. A highpass sharpen with a mask was used to remove some of the blur of the eyes.

[AdamZx3]

I started off with a levels adjustment to correct the color cast (still a greenish cast on her shirt from skintone adj. could isolate that if I had time). Then to tone down the red blotchy spots I used a curves adj. layer and added some cyan, filled the mask with black and then painted over the blotchy spots. I then used the dodge/burn layer to lighten up some of the shadows on the face. Finished off with a curves layer set to luminosity to add a bit of contrast.

I forgot to edit in srgb so it looks a bit on the cool side in the browser, I embedded the profile so it should look right in photoshop or safari browser.

Some tutorials that might help

Skintones:
http://www.smugmug.com/help/skin-tone

Blotchy Skin: (havn't tried this one yet looks kinda good!)
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=23233

[jelhak]

Haven't tried it yet but download issue #10 of Pbase magazine (http://www.pbase.com/magazine) and go to page 10-12. It looks like a good technique for blotchy skin and still keeping the skin texture. Hope this works for you.

[chillin]

I tried combination of textures from your pic & an extra one.

[Hello_taipan]

DCobb :
im only used to work in rgb or cmyk, can u tell me more on ur choice to work in lab mode ? n thanx for the lady

Mister monday:
yes i was suspecting something was wrong with green n blue channel, now i know how to deal with it thx to u.

Cassidy:
nice work u done there. pretty close to what i was looking for. but im still confused about ur technique: as i got it, u sampled a color on a layer in color mode, and adjusted it; u mean adjustement such as hue or color corretion ?

Adamzx3 :
good thing u mentionned the curves, i failed last night on a quick try, but ill try to try over now with better control like low opacity B&W brush.


Big thanks for the reply guys, ill be working on ur techniques. forgive the quick answer i got to run to work. (yeah i know it's sunday lol)

[Cassidy]

Alex for adjusting of the colour, I created a new layer and set its blending mode to colour. I sampled a section in the surrounding area and then painted onto the blank layer. I then reduced the opacity of this layer so it would blend better.

I also did some slight colour adjustment using a soft light layer, once again selecting from a closeby area and then using very very low opacity, brushed the less colour skewed areas

[Hello_taipan]

hey cassidy, thnx for the explanations, ill be practicing on that.

[Oh_Heck]

I have to agree though, the picture you posted has lost the skin texture, or most of it, due to it being slightly out of focus.

EDIT: duplicated the layer and did a surface blur with a layer mask to apply only to the skin. Added another layer using that mask with a low opacity brush to blend in tones, added another layer with 50 percent gray, added noise, gausian blur to soften slightly and light emboss to try and create some texture to the skin.

[Hello_taipan]

ok been working mao on this one.
here's the work flow:

-noiseware
-exposition with curves
-D&B
-select>color range then desat on yellow
-inverted blue channel to reduce yellow (thnx chris)
-a few other hue on selections
-then painting on color layer "with ver vey low opacity!" thnx cassidy

-D&B on neutral layer to add back some shadows
-HP sharpen
that's it i think. (..a bit tired, 6am here :p)

Tell me what i missed here and there, what u think.
the images original/retouched:

[Hello_taipan]

ok here's another one, lighten hair and another exposure for the eyes...
watchathink?

here's a bigger size this time:

[AdamZx3]

Looking better, I drew up a markup of some things that need corrected. You might try to convert a copy to cmyk and try out some of the values that where in the tutorial, they wont be exact but should be ballpark...especially at 6am I had to re adjust the darks/lights in the levels after converting to get the image so that the CMY values of 7:20:24 would look close. (didnt really mess too much with it but it made the color better)

Her left cheek was too yellow, but after changing the skintone cast it changed has a high bias to magenta. There was also a dark oval on the cheek that needs fixed as well looks like a color correction, next time feather it out

The shirt has a heavy cyan cast as well ( 16%,0%,3%,0% CMYK) You might need to isolate the shirt from the rest to get a good color.

btw the markup was on the first pic.

Hope this helps

[AdamZx3]

Also check out the differance in proofing between the browser and photoshop (tested in safari 2 and firefox, in adobe1998 and srgb, both do the same!)

Is everyone else noticing the big difference between the two?

I figured in SRGB it would be a lot closer!

[Mike_E]

Hello everybody! Brand New guy here, Can I play?

I didn't worry too much with the artifacts as that is a different horse all together but as I remember it I started by converting to 16 bit, went to levels to tighten the range, then went to match color and played with the sliders to White balance. I converted to lab and went to the lightness and then smart sharpened (yes I know), then gaus. blurred the noise there as well. A history brush to bring back the detail in the eyes and nose and mouth and I stopped there because the lady seemed to need a nice dreamy look.

Any way, life is much easier when you shoot in raw but this was fun, thanks.

mike

http://i169.photobucket.com/albums/u...C4769rcopy.jpg