Eye dropper reading problems PSCS4/JPEGs

[snook305]

Hello I was wondering if someone could help me out as I have never seen this before.
A friend of mine had some images done for her Pilates Spa and they are really Magenty in the skin tones. So I said send me the images and I will try and balance them. Well when I put an Eye dropper down on the skin tones and change the info palette to CYMK I get the C channel reading 0! with an explanation sign after it no matter where I put the point down on the skin.
They are Jpegs with adobe 1998 color profile.
Can some one help me out?
Thanks for any help as I always tune my skin tones with the eye dropper tool and get great results. I usually work with 16 bit TIFF images and not Jpegs but not sure that is the problem.
Thanks again for any suggestions
Snook

[mistermonday]

Hi Snook, the info palette displays an exclamation point next to the CMYK values if the color beneath the pointer or color sampler is out of the printable CMYK color gamut.
For balancing skin tones, I would really recommend that you try changing one of those two the info eyedroppers to LAB color and examine the A and B channel values. There is a consistent relationship between skin color and the values / ratio between the A and B channels. There are only two diemsions to worry about instead of 4. Moreover if you temporarily convert the image to LAB color it is often quicker and more effective to adjust the color using a curve - usually a single adjustment.
Regards, Murray

[snook305]

Thanks Murry but I am not really familiar with LAB and feel 100% sure of my adjustments in CYMK but I appreciate your help.
I guess I will just do it through RGB and try my best. It is just for a friend for her web and not that demanding.
I just have never seen the C channel go to 0 before...:+}

Do you have a quick summary of your LAB trick?
I read Dan MArgulis book a coupe of years back but never really go into LAB.
Actually in his later DVD tutorials which I also have, He actually does not use LAB anymore himself...:+}
Snook

[Flashtones]

This probably isn't appropriate for someone at your level, but we all have brain freezes from time to time. Is it possible that you were sampling from a layer mask or an empty layer?

Speaking of brain freezes, never mind, that wouldn't get you the exclamation mark, and I'm sure you'd notice all your colors reading 0.

[mistermonday]

I agree with Flashtones. Sometimes it is easy to accidentally toggle active the mask instead of the pixel side of the layer. If the mask is white the reading will be zero.
Dan never used LAB for everything. You can do certain things in LAB that can not be done in other color spaces. Dan still uses it for certain tasks.
Regards, Murray

[Quantum3]

Maybe the image has no cyan, it's not common but sometimes happens, specially when the image color is off and for the eyes, the image maybe good looking. It happened to me once.