Skin tone check please.

anonymouscuban

Can you all with calibrated monitors give me a skin check on this shot?

Based on everything I can see on my calibrated monitor, they should be right on but they just seem so pale to me. All other colors look spot on. Both women are really fair skinned and my wife's eyes says skin tones look right but man, they look really pale to me. It was a bit on the colder side when we shot these so maybe that's it.

novicesnapper

They seem a little cool to me AC. Maybe just a tic too much flash?

ETA the reason I mentioned flash, was look at the side of their face, camera left, notice where the flash falls off, they have nice skin tines.

anonymouscuban

OK. That's one point for too cool.

Anybody else?

divamum

I think the color/tone is fine, but this is a case where I'd either

1. Use the "sable" gradient from my Florabella collection (one of my favorite ways of fixing skin tones)
2. Add a low-opacity layer in "multiply" mode to warm it up a bit (you might need to reduce contrast in compensation)
3. Add a warming filter.

YMMV.

Mask as appropriate

anonymouscuban

This better?

divamum

Yes and no. It's looking really pink to me this morning, esp the gal on the right. I feel like you need some more yellow. Can you experiment with a white balance taken off the silver necklace?

Mitchell

Alex, are you using a gel on your flash? This could be a case where the cool white of your strobe is messing with your outdoor WB.

anonymouscuban

Mitchell wrote: »

Alex, are you using a gel on your flash? This could be a case where the cool white of your strobe is messing with your outdoor WB.

No Gel Mitchell. I've never had an issue in the past but this is the first winter I shoot outdoors with flash like this. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with winter light, the cold or a combination of the two but I may need to start using a warming gel on my flash this time of year. I have a few so it's not a matter of not having them.

I've tried using various "warming" filters in post but they all give their skin tones a really unnatural look. Makes it worse than it is now. I can almost live with the skin tones as is if I can't find a way to correct them. I don't think they're horribly off. I am going to try Diva's suggestion of grab WB off the necklace to see if that works. Will post up the results in a sec.

Stay tuned.

divamum

I often use silver jewelry or the white of an eye - different results, usually, and then I pick which one I like best

Also, agree mixed lighting may be the culprit here; also, perhaps the pink being reflected from their shirts.... ?

wave01

what was your lighting setup if you dont mind me asking

anonymouscuban

divamum wrote: »

I often use silver jewelry or the white of an eye - different results, usually, and then I pick which one I like best

Also, agree mixed lighting may be the culprit here; also, perhaps the pink being reflected from their shirts.... ?

I do as well Diva. I searched and searched for areas that I can pick up a gray tone and tried several spots but didn't find any that worked. Failed to notice the necklace to be honest. DOH!

So these are sampling off the necklace at different spots:

A


B

anonymouscuban

wave01 wrote: »

what was your lighting setup if you dont mind me asking

Don't mind at all. I use the same lighting setup with all my outdoor portraits. Very complicated so I will list it out.

First, the Equipment List:

1. One 9 foot light stand
2. Large Shoot Through Umbrella
3. SB-900 Speeedlight
4. Remote Triggers
5. Wife that never wears sensible shoes so she is able to stand where I need her to hold the light stand up so it doesn't blow over
6. Sun low in the sky

Now the Method:

1. Place subject(s) so their faces are in full shade and if possible, sun is rim light
2. Place light stand slightly off to one side, outside of camera view and up high so it's at a natural angle on subject.
3. Instruct wife to hold light in place.
4. Get yelled at a bit if she has to stand in "yucky stuff" in order to hold light
5. Take photos.

I'm trying to be funny of course. It's just a simple one light setup. I tried more complicated setups with two lights but this seems to give me the results I want with the most minimal gear possible to have to carry around and setup/break down. Makes me very mobile. I can move about quite easily during the shoot.

BTW, I trigger my flashes now with Pixel King triggers. Love them so far. They work flawlessly. I was using the pop-up flash on my D700 before and it worked but sometimes I'd run into line of sight or distance issues. No problem with the triggers now. I also carry a back up SB-600 just in case my flash fails or I need a second light. Hasn't happened yet. Knock on wood.

Sam

Alex,

They look like pasty white people with a pink cast.

In general (always exceptions of course) I think Caucasians look better with the reds / pinks reduced and a little color like a light sun tan.

Sam

anonymouscuban

I think I'm going to bring along "Tan in a Can" the next time I shoot pasty white people.

Ok... here are two more edits:

C - Another WB correction.


D - Same as above but with a low opacity warming filter layer added

Jane B.

How much could be simply that they are lighter skinned than most of the people that you spend the most time with.

anonymouscuban

Jane B. wrote: »

How much could be simply that they are lighter skinned than most of the people that you spend the most time with.

Oh trust me, that is exactly what I was thinking but then I just got this FB message from Mom:

Is there any way to give us white folk a little more color?

Wasn't sure how to interpret that... is she saying the colors look off or that they're accurate but is there a way to add a bit more color.

I replied telling her not to trust monitor colors too much since they are often off and advised her to drop by so I can present them to her on my calibrated display. As I'm typing this post, I got a reply to my latest message:

Hooking the laptop up to our tv so I can see them there. I think you're right about my monitor.

So now I'm back to square one.

novicesnapper

See if you like this. And the larger master around 2 megs is linked below. You might need to turn the megenta? down ever so slightly, but I'm on the linux machine with gimp. Not my photo machine.



2 meg file
http://imageshack.us/a/img109/1254/dsc8353editedit2x3touch.jpg

divamum

I'm lovin' D, Alex.

Snapper, your rework is way too saturated on this monitor - that may be the low res file you were working with, but that one is too much for me

novicesnapper

Probably Diva, I hardly ever work images on this. I pushed the saturation pretty hard on it.

anonymouscuban

Diva... I ended up going with sample D since it looked best to me. Glad you agree.

Novice... Yeah, that's a bit much but thanks for chiming in. The funny thing is that I bet if I originally went with your edit, they'd love them. I find what the average person thinks is a great photo almost makes me want to barf all over my camera.

novicesnapper

Lmao, laughing so hard here, and yep, I think the same thing, they may rave over it lol. But I never trust this machine for true reproduction, being Linux. I just missed an X-Rite the other day for $50, still kicking myself over that one, that would have made recalibrating so much easier on my other machine.

wave01

thanks for the lighting set up