Skintone help, please

[Peer K]

Hi RP!

I cannot for the life of me get a proper skintone on this image (restrictions prevent me from posting the whole thing, sorry). I'm looking for a nice natural tanned look instead of the pinkish tone the whole thing has now.

I'm very much looking forward to your input - please tell me how you arrived at your look, so I can learn :-)

Thank you!

[fotogen]

Peer K,

I have had the same questions in the past and there is actually a thread that I started on skin tones.
The solution to your problem is D&B. Have you ever used method of retouching before?
The skin tones of your model is very uneven right now, she is dark circles under her eyes etc... You can correct all of this using D&B and get the skin to be nice and tonal changes will be gradual which is pleasing to the eye. Once the skin is at that level, you can use a layer set to COLOR and paint in any color you want for the skin. You can also unsaturate or saturate the image to get the tones you want. But as I mentioned, the skin has to be smooth and no abrupt tonal changes should exist on the skin.
I hope this helps. I will find the other thread and post it.

[fotogen]

Here is the other thread
http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/pho...tone-help.html

[0lBaldy]

I would use Gradient Map

[flexmanta]

There's so much retouching power that you are neglecting when you think of photoshop as the only step in retouching an image. Get the skin tone right when converting the RAW. Use Capture One.

[fotogen]

Originally Posted by flexmanta

There's so much retouching power that you are neglecting when you think of photoshop as the only step in retouching an image. Get the skin tone right when converting the RAW. Use Capture One.

Flexmanta,

Is Capture one really better than Camera Raw? Do you notice a difference in colors, specially the skin, assuming that the white balance is done and the monitor is calibrated.

Thanks

[flexmanta]

Yep, big difference when it comes to skin colors. It's all about the profiles. Capture One's profiles have beautiful skin yellows and reds. It also has a lot of tools dedicated purely to skin color with realistic effect ranges. It also has the uniformity slider, which lets you sample a particular skin color of your image, and bring all the skin closer to it with great results. Capture One takes time to get used to because it's not as straight forward as ACR is. It also requires that you really train your eye... once you start using it you will probably become obsessed with perfect skin tone... but that's a good thing in this business. I'm still not 100% comfortable with it, but I'm forcing myself to use it instead of camera raw.

It's only weakpoint is that it's not integrated into the adobe suite as seamlessly as ACR is and although it will open the conversion straight into photoshop, it will be a tiff file that it created and physically saved into a folder. The good thing about this is that, if you are used to merging more than one conversion of the same raw for each part of the image as in some cold parts, some other warmer ones, and some fill light for hair, you create whats called "variants". Once you are done creating all the recipe variants of that single raw, you hit the process button and all of them will be saved as TIFF and opened in photoshop for you to create your base layer.


...it's also one of the best programs for tethered shooting.

[fotogen]

I am going to look into it. If they have a trial version, I will try it...
Thanks for the input.

[holgaman]

I'm with Flexmanta on Capture One, it's really great. The skin tone adjustments he referred to are in the Color Editor, which is in version 5 Pro. If I remember correctly, I tried the trial version and got the regular version (which doesn't have the color editor), and not the pro version. Maybe I did something wrong when downloading the trial, but check to see if the version you get is the Pro version.