How do you get your skin tones right
I have a number of team photos that I am editing (also single images) and I have a battle getting skin tones correct.
I go through and edit them and think they look fine.
I come back later and think they now all look to red ... so fix again
Come back later and now think they look to yellow or whatever the case may be
How do you know when you have the balance correct?
If you haven't already, my idea is to find & try your software's auto-correct options for tone, contrast, & color. See what happens. See if you like the result.
Then, would you be allowed to post one here for others to try editing?
Thanks everyone.
Have seen that link before and have looked at others
I think the problem I have is that I'm looking at different people all the time with all different skin colours and not just editing the same bride through different images.
I think it's just that as I edit my eyes adjust to say 'a little more red' or 'a little more yellow' when I am actually doing it but when I walk away for a bit and come back that is when I go 'to yellow' or 'to red'
Maybe I need to keep a photo beside the monitor of my goal so that my mind doesn't drift with the colours.
In that sense, the "easiest" way to adjust skin colors is to adjust your monitor :-) It's a perpetual conundrum. If the final deliverable is to be a print, then you are entirely at the mercy of the environment the print is to be displayed in; ideally, you'd print one version for hanging in natural light, another for tungsten, a third for fluorescent, and so on. And it's a reality that whenever you return to your computer from "elsewhere" your eyes aren't adjusted to the computer version of the spectrum, but they soon will be.
If you do a lot of work under the same, fixed conditions (your own studio, for example, or a public place with consistent lighting) then you can build a LR profile for your starting-point PP for those images.
Personally I have found skin tones to be easier to work with in Photoshop or Capture One Pro. Lightroom, on the other hand, has always given me challenges in this area. I'm sure others are fine with Lightroom, so I'm not stating an absolute, I'm just saying I find skin tones easier in certain other tools.
