Skin Tones /Tan How to??

rickp

I'm using LR3 and CS5 as my PPing software.
What I've noticed is that using the saturation or vibrance sliders the skin tones tend to get a bit of an orange tint.
What I'm looking to do is ad a bit of a tan or color to certain images with skin in them. Does anyone have a good procedure or color formula to achieve this? I'm not looking for anything crazy just give people a bit of natural tan color.

BTW, I'm shooting RAW

Thanks
R.

malch

rickp wrote: »

I'm using LR3 and CS5 as my PPing software.
What I've noticed is that using the saturation or vibrance sliders the skin tones tend to get a bit of an orange tint.
What I'm looking to do is ad a bit of a tan or color to certain images with skin in them. Does anyone have a good procedure or color formula to achieve this?

If the skin tones are starting to look too orange, that suggests you really overcooked the saturation. Try backing off just a little. Depending on the individual skin and the image, a very small adjustment to the hue may produce a more pleasing skin tone. You can tweak both non-destructively with a HSL adjustment layer (and use a mask if you want to protect other parts of the image).

After that you can start messing with the per-channel curves but that requires a lot of practice to do quickly and well.

rickp

thanks for the feedback. I think that's what i might be doing, too much sat.

R.

jfriend

Since I can't see the images you're trying to adjust, we're all just guessing. But, it might be helpful to know that saturation affects all colors. Vibrance is supposed to affect things that are low in saturation more than things that are already pretty well saturated and it's supposed to stay away from skin tones (I don't know how they do that or who well they do it).

As malch said, you probably want to change the actual color balance rather than just change saturation or vibrance and you may need to target just skin areas so avoid making other things look odd. A sun tan is not just more saturated compared to no sun tan. It's a different color.