How's my skin tones?

Ann McRae

You may know that I've just made a huge upgrade to monitors, and consequently also changed from PSP to PSCS3. In doing so, I intend to try to follow ll the great tutorials that previously, I tried to modify for PSP or ignored!!!

When I converted this photo, it was overall to 'golden'. I edited it by 'eye' and then tried to follow this tutorial.

My initial edit had yellow less than magenta (barely), but following the advanced part of the tutorial (CMYK curves adjustments) actually pushed yellow way past magenta, so clearly I was doing somethin wrong.

Anyway, my by 'eye' adjustment - what is good or bad here:

jfriend

Ann McRae wrote:

You may know that I've just made a huge upgrade to monitors, and consequently also changed from PSP to PSCS3. In doing so, I intend to try to follow ll the great tutorials that previously, I tried to modify for PSP or ignored!!!

When I converted this photo, it was overall to 'golden'. I edited it by 'eye' and then tried to follow this tutorial.

My initial edit had yellow less than magenta (barely), but following the advanced part of the tutorial (CMYK curves adjustments) actually pushed yellow way past magenta, so clearly I was doing somethin wrong.

Anyway, my by 'eye' adjustment - what is good or bad here:

It works for me. In all skin spots I looked at, the Yellow is slightly more than the Magenta which is the way it should be. The Cyan is in an OK range. The things that probably should be white or neutral (shoes, t-shirts, lettering on jerseys) are all quite near a neutral which is always a very good test. Technically, it looks pretty good to me.

This is a personal taste item, but I thought it might look just a tad better if there was a little more Cyan in the skin color which I got by adding a Selective Color layer and bumping up the Cyan in the reds.

The one other thing you might consider is dropping the overall brightness just a tad. This can make the skin detail just a little easier to see and seems to lessen the impact of the background.

After dropping the overall brightness, I liked adding a little shadow adjustment to open up some detail in the dark uniforms.

What makes this tough to judge by eye is that the background color is competing very heavily with the skin tones. The background is itself very nearly a skin-tone color so I think it makes it hard for your eye to judge the skin color on the people. It would be easier to judge by eye if the background was some other color.

Here's what those adjustments I mentioned look like (not a big change, but a slightly different take):


And, your original:

Ann McRae

Thanks! I found it really interesting that your preference was to add more reddish tones - I like the color you achieved, but would have expected to be told it was too red. Shows what I know!

So I went back to my original RAW, converted, then used the tutorial levels adjustment rather than the CMYK adjustment....I think I was thinking backward first time around...anyway, here is another attempt:


also toned the brightness down a bit too. And, I'm sure this is obvious, cropped a bunch of the background.

Interestingly, I've got a big difference between my two monitors on this shot - way greener on the iMac than on the cinema display - looks good on the cinema.
ann

Ann McRae

Anyone have any feedback for me? Am I on the right track, or totally out to lunch?

SloYerRoll

Looks pretty good to me.

Try to get the grass to pop out a bit by doing something like this:
Bump up the saturation of the yellow till it's looks a bit too yellow, then bring up the yellow hue till it starts to shift the grass to green. Voila! Green grass!

I don't see this affecting your skin tones at all.

Cheers,
-Jon

Ann McRae

Thanks, Jon. But it is October in Edmonton - grass has not been green in weeks - it was about 10C at the most this day.

I'm not worried about the grass, but wil keep that trick in mind for another time.

ann

jjbong

Ann McRae wrote:

Thanks! I found it really interesting that your preference was to add more reddish tones - I like the color you achieved, but would have expected to be told it was too red. Shows what I know!

Technical comment here. What jfriend actually did was reduce reds. He increased the cyan (a red killer) in the parts of the photo that Selective
Color considers reds.

Ann McRae

Thank you - point taken. But look at the two photos in John's post - original is on the bottom - and the resultant is 'redder'. I am truely trying to learn here, and appreciate your time

jjbong wrote:

Technical comment here. What jfriend actually did was reduce reds. He increased the cyan (a red killer) in the parts of the photo that Selective
Color considers reds.

jfriend

Ann McRae wrote:

Thanks! I found it really interesting that your preference was to add more reddish tones - I like the color you achieved, but would have expected to be told it was too red. Shows what I know!

So I went back to my original RAW, converted, then used the tutorial levels adjustment rather than the CMYK adjustment....I think I was thinking backward first time around...anyway, here is another attempt:


also toned the brightness down a bit too. And, I'm sure this is obvious, cropped a bunch of the background.

Interestingly, I've got a big difference between my two monitors on this shot - way greener on the iMac than on the cinema display - looks good on the cinema.
ann

Looks significantly improved over your first one to me. According to the CMKY numbers, the skin-tone might be just a smidge too yellow, but it could also just be left as is. The drop in brightness shows a lot more detail in the skin, the whites and the grass. I personally would do a shadow adjustment in order to bring out a little more detail in the dark uniforms as they are almost blocked (so dark it's hard to see any detail). I'd set the tonal width slider down to maybe 25% (so only the darkest colors are affected) and then play with the amount slider until you like what you see. The tighter crop helps a lot.

jjbong

Ann McRae wrote:

Thank you - point taken. But look at the two photos in John's post - original is on the bottom - and the resultant is 'redder'. I am truely trying to learn here, and appreciate your time

Can't say that I see it as redder. And playing around in Photoshop comparing the LAB values of the two told me only that his is darker in the skin tones, with very slight color differences. I did verify that the darker skin tones are considered "Red" by Selective Color (just add a lot of black and see what gets darker). I guess that the big move here is darkening overall and bringing out the shadows.