Bruce Beard's Hair and Skin Charts

[Andrew Hart]

I have been searching this site, in vain, for days trying to locate a non-broken copy of these charts. All links seem to end up here:

http://www.retouchpro.com/pages/colors.html

but when you access that page the photos are broken and clicking on either of them simply takes you back to the home page.
Does anyone have a working copy of these charts/images that they could re-post to this site ? I would be very grateful for any assistance

[mistermonday]

Re: Bruce Beard's Hair and Skin Charts

You can find large versions of both charts in this thread link below. There is a link to the hair color chart just below the skin color chart.

http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00EdCe

BTW, the links that you say are broken in your thread work fine for me.
However the above link has a higher resolution better quality Hair Color chart as the color values are dead on. The skin tone chart is a little off on some of the swatches probably because of color space differences between the Web and sRGB.

Regards, Murray

[Andrew Hart]

Re: Bruce Beard's Hair and Skin Charts

Thank you so much Murray! I have now retrieved both charts from your link. I am in the dark as to why you (and others) can read the charts on this, retouchpro, site and I cannot. Must be something to do with my browser (Firefox) and/or its settings I suppose but just what remains a mystery.

[Doug Nelson]

Re: Bruce Beard's Hair and Skin Charts

It's listed in the FAQ

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/html.php?file=bbcolorcharts.html

[Dave.Cox]

Re: Bruce Beard's Hair and Skin Charts

I created a pallet of swatches very similar to these color charts quite some time ago. That way they are always available in your swatches pallet to pick from and you don't have to hunt for them. I would be happy to make them available to anyone that wants them. just send me a PM.

[grygarness]

Re: Bruce Beard's Hair and Skin Charts

The trouble with downloading this chart from the web is that the document has no color profile. This makes the swatches totally erratic, and therefore useless. If you assign Adobe RGB the file will become saturated and contrasty. If you assign ColorMatch it becomes less so. Try sRGB and it'll be less saturated and quite contrasty. This is a typical broken link in the chain of color management. The 'flavour' of RGB is what gives meaning to those numbers. A formula for color in one flavour of RGB will often appear different in another, and when we work with skin tones this has an enormous impact, because we're dealing with memory colors – colors that our eyes are amazingly good at perceiving. These days we always work with ICC profiles – whether we're aware of it or not. You may or may not get the warning dialogs, because many PS users may be working on the Color Settings defaults, and they don't inform you of such inconsistencies. If using these charts, I would make the colors from the RGB numbers below the swatches. I tried. Doing so immediately threw up another issue for me. On the top left swatch I balked a little when I saw the number 255 220 177, because 255 is never a good sign. To me it says that the red is maxed out i.e. it's clipping. Indeed, re-making the color by this formula in ARGB and then soft-proofing it against my working CMYK (Coated Fogra 27) gives an immediate color change on screen. In other words, this color will not translate faithfully to CMYK. It got darker and slightly more Mag when pressing Cmd+Y. On further testing it'll also print darker and redder on SWOP. I'm sure most of the other colors are fine, but I'd be a bit skeptical to using any chart that doesn't conform to color management. --- Gry Garness

Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop
Author of:
Essential Color Optimization in Photoshop CS3
Essential Color Management
Digital Retouching for Fashion, Beauty and Portrait Photography

https://www.grygarness.com