Yellow Splotchy Skin

Dosha · May 9, 2009

Hello everyone,

I'm new here and a total amateur, but I was hoping you could help me with this photo that is driving me nuts. The more I do to it, the worse it looks, and the original is bad, but I was hoping to somehow salvage it anyway because it's a photo of my friend's daughter. Anywho...what is with the yellow splotches on the skin? and how can I get rid of them? Thank you for any help!

Dosha

Dosha · May 9, 2009

I thought I inserted a photo, but I don't see it? guess I need help with that as well.

pathfinder · May 10, 2009

Dosha wrote:

Hello everyone,

I'm new here and a total amateur, but I was hoping you could help me with this photo that is driving me nuts. The more I do to it, the worse it looks, and the original is bad, but I was hoping to somehow salvage it anyway because it's a photo of my friend's daughter. Anywho...what is with the yellow splotches on the skin? and how can I get rid of them? Thank you for any help!

Dosha

Your code in this post looks correct - do you have to enable external links on photobucket perhaps?

Here is a tutorial on posting pics here on dgrin - http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1083138

Dosha · May 10, 2009

Thank you for that! Now, as you can see....please help? pretty please?

MarkR · May 10, 2009

I'd guess you have a white balance issue, as the image looks to me to be very yellow/magenta throughout.

What tools are you using to edit the image? (Most have some sort of white balance correction in them somewhere.)

Also, is there anything in the image that you know is a neutral color (white, black, or gray)? The dress looks to me like it might be white, but it could also be pink or some other pastel color ...

Dosha · May 10, 2009

MarkR wrote:

I'd guess you have a white balance issue, as the image looks to me to be very yellow/magenta throughout.

What tools are you using to edit the image? (Most have some sort of white balance correction in them somewhere.)

Also, is there anything in the image that you know is a neutral color (white, black, or gray)? The dress looks to me like it might be white, but it could also be pink or some other pastel color ...

I have Photoshop CS3, but don't know a lot about it yet. I've been reading a ton on here, and tried some of the curve adjustment tutorials, but I'm just not getting it. I finally decided to ask for help.

Her dress is white.

Thank you...Dosha

Thunder Rabbit · May 10, 2009

Howdy.

The simplest thing you can do is adjust the color balance.

Press Ctrl+B. The Color Balance dialog box opens.

The bottom slider has Yellow on the left, Blue on the right.

Drag the slider to the right towards blue until the image looks right.

ziggy53 · May 10, 2009

Dosha,

It looks like maybe 3 different light sources were used:

Tungsten
Fluorescent
Flash

Is that possible?

At any rate I do not see a simple solution to correct the tones in this image. If at all possible reshoot and control the lighting using only one color temperature light source(s).

Barring that, you might try converting the image to B&W.

pathfinder · May 10, 2009

What camera was this shot with?

Was ISO 6400 the only option for this image? There is a lot of noise in this image.

I agree with Ziggy there was a lot of tungsten light here, but also something else.

BinaryFx · May 11, 2009

A quick fix is channel mixer, in this quick case it worked better than attempting to use white balance correction (however with more time one may do better). You can use different values, this is just a quick "ballpark" correction to help get things back to "normal". Most use channel mixer to create grayscale images, however it can also be used for some colour edits (it is just a little harder to do so).

Red Output Channel: Source 80% red + 20% green
Green Output Channel: Source 20% Red + 80% green
Blue Output Channel: Source 25% Red + 75% blue

This channel mixer adjustment layer was set to color blend mode so as not to affect the overall apparent luminosity.

This "fix" is only for the skintone, I had to make the clothing closer to neutral using curves.

Hope this helps,

Stephen Marsh

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/
http://prepression.blogspot.com/

Thunder Rabbit · May 11, 2009

Howdy.

As Ziggy says, there are several different temperature light sources here, and it would be very difficult to color balance the whole image. The adjustment below was done in Color Balance. It's far from perfect, but it only took about 15 seconds, and it gets you in the ball park.

Just for kicks, I duplicated the layer and set the blending mode to Screen and the opacity to 50% to remove some of the splotchyness. You might try a higher opacity to remove even more.

As you can see, I cropped it to remove some of the distractions. And sharpened it a little too.

There is no end to the further adjustments that could be made. As Stephen suggested, the color mixer would be a good choice for your next step to fine tune the image if you didn't want to use it as your first adjustment. The color mixer also has some B&W presets if you want an easy way to try Ziggy's suggestion. I tested it an it looked pretty good in B&W. Applying a Gaussian blur could further reduce the splotchyness.

In Ps, there is more than one way to skin a cat. I'm not sure my suggestion is the best way for this image, but the Color Balance tool is simple, intuitive, and a good place for a beginner to start.

You might also find it helpful to go to Menu>Image>Adjustments>Variations.

It will show thumbnails of your image with side by side comparisons of different variations.

Dosha · May 11, 2009

ziggy53 wrote:

Dosha,

It looks like maybe 3 different light sources were used:

Tungsten
Fluorescent
Flash

Is that possible?

At any rate I do not see a simple solution to correct the tones in this image. If at all possible reshoot and control the lighting using only one color temperature light source(s).

Barring that, you might try converting the image to B&W.

OMGosh I hope one day I can look at a photo and see that someone used different light sources! Anywho...it was indoors with no natural light coming in (rain), so there was def Tungsten, but I think I left my WB on Flourescent from shooting in the school the day before. I did not use a flash, though. It was a bad shot, but I don't see my friend and her daughter very often, so I wanted to somehow save it, but I'll just get it to look the best I can and be done. It does look fine in BW.

Thank you!

Dosha · May 11, 2009

pathfinder wrote:

What camera was this shot with?

Was ISO 6400 the only option for this image? There is a lot of noise in this image.

I agree with Ziggy there was a lot of tungsten light here, but also something else.

I was on auto ISO, so I didn't pay attention. I have a Nikon D300 and I'm still learning everything.

Tungsten combined with a bad WB setting. I know pretty much what I did wrong, but I was hoping to fix it anyway. Thanks again for any input.

Dosha · May 11, 2009

BinaryFx wrote:

A quick fix is channel mixer, in this quick case it worked better than attempting to use white balance correction (however with more time one may do better). You can use different values, this is just a quick "ballpark" correction to help get things back to "normal". Most use channel mixer to create grayscale images, however it can also be used for some colour edits (it is just a little harder to do so).

Red Output Channel: Source 80% red + 20% green
Green Output Channel: Source 20% Red + 80% green
Blue Output Channel: Source 25% Red + 75% blue

This channel mixer adjustment layer was set to color blend mode so as not to affect the overall apparent luminosity.

This "fix" is only for the skintone, I had to make the clothing closer to neutral using curves.

Hope this helps,

Stephen Marsh

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/
http://prepression.blogspot.com/

Thank you Stephen...off to try this! It looks so much better. I appreciate the help, Dosha

Dosha · May 11, 2009

Thunder Rabbit wrote:

Howdy.

As Ziggy says, there are several different temperature light sources here, and it would be very difficult to color balance the whole image. The adjustment below was done in Color Balance. It's far from perfect, but it only took about 15 seconds, and it gets you in the ball park.

Just for kicks, I duplicated the layer and set the blending mode to Screen and the opacity to 50% to remove some of the splotchyness. You might try a higher opacity to remove even more.

As you can see, I cropped it to remove some of the distractions. And sharpened it a little too.

There is no end to the further adjustments that could be made. As Stephen suggested, the color mixer would be a good choice for your next step to fine tune the image if you didn't want to use it as your first adjustment. The color mixer also has some B&W presets if you want an easy way to try Ziggy's suggestion. I tested it an it looked pretty good in B&W. Applying a Gaussian blur could further reduce the splotchyness.

In Ps, there is more than one way to skin a cat. I'm not sure my suggestion is the best way for this image, but the Color Balance tool is simple, intuitive, and a good place for a beginner to start.

You might also find it helpful to go to Menu>Image>Adjustments>Variations.

It will show thumbnails of your image with side by side comparisons of different variations.

Thank you Lee...I will try some of these tips as well. I appreciate your help! Dosha

BinaryFx · May 12, 2009

Dosha, a few things that I did not have time to mention in my OP...

i) Raw or JPEG? If you were shooting in raw mode, then that would be the first place to start, by adjusting white balance. That being said, this may or may not help later corrections as it will only address one light source. I would not use the WB eyedropper and would manually "dial in" the required values.

ii) While in the raw converter, look at using some colour/chroma noise reduction. If you shot JPEG with no raw, then this can be done in Photoshop (basically, by smoothing/blurring in color blend mode) -

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/howto_colourblur.html

If the noise is still an issue, then you may need to look into luminance noise reduction, over and above the more subtle colour noise reduction.

iii) Global, separate channel based moves such as curves and channel mixer would be my suggestion for such a correction, before more selective colour edits (one may not need as many selective edits when global moves are done right).

iv) In Photoshop, the Info palette window can be set to display Lab colour values. The "a" channel contains positve values for magenta and negative values for green hues. The "b" channel holds positive values for yellow and negative values for blue. The "L" channel is lightness, or tone (no colour). When "mousing around" the image with the cursor, one can inspect the Lab colour values for various hues. For example, a red hue such as skin should have positive values in the two colour channels - if you have a negative reading then there is green or blue (not magenta or yellow). Lab colour value readings are a major help when evaluating colour.

Regards,

Stephen Marsh

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx
http://prepression.blogspot.com

Yellow Splotchy Skin

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