Troublesome Skin Tones

Pindy

I have a photo I love that was taken in some freakishly low light with a weird WB and I was wondering if anybody had any advice for fixing it. I have, with limited success, read and applied the tutorial here on skin tones and Andy has offered good advice. I have tried adjusting WB, which makes a huge difference, but I cannot get a natural skin tone out of any adjustments I make, MB or not. The skin often comes out too orange/yellow or pink like a rose.

I think I need an expert:



Here is a better tone for reference:

Andy

2nd photo link no good - check for external links "on" in the gallery plz.

Pindy

Sorry, Protected Gallery. How's that?

Andy

Pindy wrote:

weird, I'm looking at it right now.

That is because you have it cached in your browser. We cannot see it if external links are not enabled in the gallery customization, thanks.

Andy

Andy wrote:

That is because you have it cached in your browser. We cannot see it if external links are not enabled in the gallery customization, thanks.

OK fixed.

Andy

Easily fixed with white balance adjustment in Photoshop or Lightroom. What do you have for post processing software?

Pindy

I have CS3, Aperture and (newly) Lightroom. I'd love to see an example done by more experienced eyes. I find that JUST doing a WB adjustment still leaves some aspects to be desired, tone-wise. I suppose you cannot salvage everything, though.

pathfinder

Badly under exposed, but a 16bit ProPhoto color space....


I saved the image to my desktop and opened it in Adobe RAW converter 4.1 for the initial lightening and color correction. Then, I opened it in Photoshop and dropped the red channel a bit and raised the blue channel a bit after setting a blackpoint.

Here is the result - a very noisy image with lots of red mottling in the infants face, but the cmy niumbers on the infants neck and the outer area of the cheek of the child on the left are in the ball park for Caucasians. How did i2e handle this Andy?

BinaryFx

If one has access to the camera raw file, the first place to start would be in ajdusting white balance, exposure and colour/luminance noise.

Further noise reduction may be required outside of the raw converter, perhaps using better third party noise reduction methods for the L noise.

Working from the posted JPEG, this is even more critical. I used Photoshop CS and worked in sRGB 8bpc. The first step was to deal with the colour component noise from the low light capture and the colour component artifacting from the JPEG process. This is even more critical since channel mixing and channel blending will later take place, one needs clean colour channels!

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

After that, some RGB channel mixer and separate R, G, B curves to bring the colour and tone into rough shape. Then various channel blending and other tonal, contrast and colour moves for some final tweaks.

A quick 'gallery' attached.

Original > [Centre] Basic Moves, Channel Mixer/Curves >

Tweaks, Channel Blending & Other "Basic" Moves.

I went for a more contrasty version in the final tweaks making things very neutral (even if they should be slightly blue), knowing that they can be blended back into the (intended) flat basic moves at a reduced opacity or with blend if sliders or modes such as luminosity. I wanted more depth and the appearance of a third dimension enhanced. Perhaps unwanted detail in the face has been amplified, although this is easy enough to reduce/remove. I also decided to go for a warmer feel in the skintones (faces and young children always making things hard). This was done on an unprofiled laptop, so I had to rely on my info palette.

Not 100% but perhaps this is moving in the direction that the OP was looking for? Let me know if more detail is required on the various steps.


Regards,

Stephen Marsh.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/

BinaryFx

pathfinder wrote:

Badly under exposed, but a 16bit ProPhoto color space....

Pathfinder, the image you posted appears rather different in Photoshop than via a web browser...

A web browser such as FireFox on the PC does not read the ProPhoto ICC tag, the colour assumed is close to sRGB for many viewers.

The sRGB image below shows how your image appears to me in FireFox on the left (assuming sRGB), while Photoshop displays the ProPhoto version on the right.

Which of the two is the intended colour appearance?

Do we assume sRGB and that the files numbers are in the final viewing space of a common monitor, or do we trust the ICC profile and view it in Photoshop, assuming that the image was never intended for accurate monitor display in a web browser? Without knowing I would presume the first option, but that assumption may be wrong.

Sorry for the confusion, but this is a good example of how hard colour management and dealing with 'foreign' images is in the real world. Did a ProPhoto image slip through, that was meant to be converted first to sRGB prior to uploading to a web forum? Or is it the common practice here to download the image and evaluate in Photoshop, rather than the web browser? If the later, what does one do with untagged images, presume sRGB or play the mystery meat guessing game? I hate to sidetrack the thread, but this is an important aspect of modern imaging that is not solving itself with the decades.


Sincerely,

Stephen Marsh.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/

BinaryFx

Pindy wrote:

I have CS3, Aperture and (newly) Lightroom. I'd love to see an example done by more experienced eyes. I find that JUST doing a WB adjustment still leaves some aspects to be desired, tone-wise. I suppose you cannot salvage everything, though.

Pindy, I think you would be amazed at what you can recover and enhance after the white balance moves, either in the raw converter or in Photoshop. Camera raw offers many new possibilites, while Photoshop should not be forgotten.

If you post an image that you are happy with as your best effort from the raw converter for colour but not tone, I can show you how tone/contrast can be enhanced in Photoshop (similar moves may or may not be possible in eariler or current camera raw converters/editors).


Regards,

Stephen Marsh.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/

Pindy

Brilliant replies, all, and thank you for your efforts. I'm learning a lot here. The bummer is that this was taken about 2 weeks before I switched to RAW shooting, so the JPEG posted is just a resized version of the master—unfortunately.

Give me a bit to look at all of these and I'll post further, and hopefully I can make a best-effort go at it myself. I'm in the middle of what's becoming an 18 hour day. :cry

pathfinder

Sorry for the confusion, Stephen. It was unintended.

I noted the 16bit ProPhoto ICC tag as I was examining the image that I downloaded from the thread here on Smugmug. I was surprised, needless to say, that the image was not sRGB for the WEB.

I thought I converted it to sRGB when I dropped it from 16bit to 8 bit, but apparently I did not.

Here is my edit without any change other than converting to sRGB. ( I use Safari so my image looks the same to me in my browser as it does in Photoshop. I will reexamine this thread at work later, where I use Windows and Firefox)

As I look at the color balance of my edit, it ALMOST looks like it need slightly more yellow - the whites of the eyes look rather blue - but when I drop the curve in the blue channel any little bit ( to raise yellow) it is too much. I these kids are pretty pale, but the image is still too dark.

pathfinder

Maybe raising the White point will help - I raised the RGB white point slightly here. On a good calibrated monitor my second image is slightly better than the first, but at work, on a cheaper LCD is looks like it is blown in areas of extreme highlights. This is a defect of my monitor at work.

There are no blown pixels on my calibrated LCD on my MBP at home this evening.

BinaryFx

pathfinder wrote:

Sorry for the confusion, Stephen. It was unintended.

I noted the 16bit ProPhoto ICC tag as I was examining the image that I downloaded from the thread here on Smugmug. I was surprised, needless to say, that the image was not sRGB for the WEB.

I thought I converted it to sRGB when I dropped it from 16bit to 8 bit, but apparently I did not.

Not a problem Pathfinder, just trying to establish the intent of the image. This illustrates one pitfall with using an RGB editing space that is very different from the final output, if the ICC profile is not read then the numbers in the file no longer produce the intended colour.

I love actions/scripts/automation/droplets as it is more productive and reduces variables and mistakes.

A very simple insurance for users of medium or wide gamut RGB editing spaces who are posting web images would be an action with say two basic instructions in it (more could be added for safety, such as initial save before the action starts and a close without save at the end):

Record action:

1. Convert to Profile: sRGB, Relative Colorimetric Intent, BPC on, Dither Off
2. Using the action palette option menu, select 'insert menu item' - then go to the file menu and select the 'save for web' command, then hit ok to finish the insert menu command step.

Stop recording action.

While on actions/automation, a huge 'bible' on the topic can be found here (MS Word .doc format):

http://www.atncentral.com/Zip_Actions/PhotoshopActions_ver1.1Btoc.zip


Regards,

Stephen Marsh.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/

ziggy53

Here is my attempt. This is actually two treatments blended together.

The first treatment used a combination of 3 layers (CMYK colorspace):

1) Original image, adjusted somewhat for Levels.
2) A layer adjusted with "Match Color" and then some very odd Curves to get closer to an appropriate density.
3) A final layer with reduced saturation and adjusted for Black level alone.

All the above layers were added together to form an image that looked closer in color and tonality. A combination of Noise Reduction and Smart Smooth were used to control grain.

The second treatment (also in CMYK) used mostly individual curves to adjust against the original tones using the skin tone tutorial on SmugMug. Again, a dose of noise reduction was used. to control grain.

Both treatments were added to the same session and merged to suit visually.

Not perfect but maybe closer?

Pindy

Thanks Ziggy—

You've managed to get a very smooth result, though it's (almost pleasingly) devoid of color. I'm finally done working for a while after Saturday and will try to compare these great ideas. Thanks all. Your expertise will inform my future photoshopping.

Strav

screwing around in acr.

Strav

okay this was touched on before - but why does the image I worked on in ACR look so much different then the one posted here? The one here is not as good.

Janie

Thought I would try my hand at it


desaturated the reds, increased the yellows, adjusted the levels, smoothed out the skin with Alien Skin's jpeg repair.

jfriend

You posted an AdobeRGB image

Strav wrote:

okay this was touched on before - but why does the image I worked on in ACR look so much different then the one posted here? The one here is not as good.

Because you post an AdobeRGB image on the web. Most browsers are not color-managed so they assume the image is sRGB and display the image as if it's colors come from that color palette. When you take an AdobeRGB image and assume it's sRGB, you get much blander colors than you should have which is exactly what happened to the image you posted.

To prevent this color shift, only put sRGB images on the web.

Here's your exact same image after converting to sRGB:



versus your AdobeRGB version which has lost a bunch of it's color:

Strav

thank you jfriend.