Pleasing skin tones with Lightroom?

eMac

Not sure if this is the right forum but, how do you translate Smugmug's Photoshop tutorial on pleasing skin tones, to lightroom HSL settings?

I've been playing with what I think could be HSL equivalents but see no difference at all in skin tonality, whereas if I follow the tutorial within photoshop, I can see it working on changing skin tones.

Thanks a lot.

Eduardo

arodney

eMac wrote:

Not sure if this is the right forum but, how do you translate Smugmug's Photoshop tutorial on pleasing skin tones, to lightroom HSL settings?

The one using CMYK values? You don't. Nor do you need to.

You should be seeing HLS affecting skin or selective colors. Use the Target Adjustment tool and then select H, S or L and scrub up and down ON the skin you wish to affect. Note that in Version 1, its global (all the colors that are selected in the entire image, perhaps not just skin will be affected).

eMac

Thanks for your answer. I'm trying to find a setting I could use in batch image processing, within LR. The first part Smugmug tutorial uses rgb, red sat -7 but then uses the levels layer blue channel to .90, which I don't know how that translates into HSL. The second part of the tutorial uses CMYK curves... as the HSL in LR has both the primary additive and substracctive color (magenta, yellow, cyan or aqua), I thought there could be a translation into what HSL numbers to use in LR and replicate the tutorial settings. But even if, for instance, I desaturate all magenta, the image looks the same! of course, everything is profiled in my workflow, even myself :-)

arodney

eMac wrote:

Thanks for your answer. I'm trying to find a setting I could use in batch image processing, within LR.

You could if the images are all similar. Forget the numbers! If you have a calibrated display make the skin look as you desire, or, match to a reference image you know is correct, then you can copy and paste the settings to the others.

rutt

I disagree with Andrew on this one. I've seen way too many images that people didn't like, didn't know why they liked, converted to B&W or something. Because the skin tones were too magenta relative to yellow or too cyan or something.

Andrew must have an amazing eye if he can reliably do this without the numbers. I have made the mistake of posting images without checking these measurements and been sorry. So have some of the best photographers here on dgrin.

Andrew and I have already been around on this one. See the thread with this post. I hope we don't have to do it again. (Please, please, Andrew, let's not revisit it here.)

So I have found that you can measure RGB values in LR. When you use the color sampler, it displays them at the bottom of its little grid of "neutral" colors. I just check flesh for at least as much blue as green, which translates into as much yellow as magenta in CMYK if that's what you are comfortable with or more B more positive than A if that's what you are comfortable with. Red should be generally quite a bit higher than either green or blue (which captures the part about cyan.) I'm sure the smugmug tutorial is more precise than this rough guideline.

arodney

rutt wrote:

Andrew must have an amazing eye if he can reliably do this without the numbers.

Its easy! Just build a small library of images that you KNOW, based on output or experience that produces pleasing skin tones, use that as a visual reference.

The numbers? OK, what about the differences in those provided by Lightroom, ACR, and Photoshop (and the fact that in Photoshop, CMYK numbers are not based on the actual image encoding)?

rutt

arodney wrote:

Its easy! Just build a small library of images that you KNOW, based on output or experience that produces pleasing skin tones, use that as a visual reference.

The numbers? OK, what about the differences in those provided by Lightroom, ACR, and Photoshop (and the fact that in Photoshop, CMYK numbers are not based on the actual image encoding)?

De gustibus non est disputandum.

arodney

rutt wrote:

So I have found that you can measure RGB values in LR.

Based on a color space that has no relationship to the color processing, nor the output color space or for that matter, any color space you have (Melissa RGB).

All synthetic RGB working spaces are well behaved (R=G=B is neutral). And there's no reason to muck around with RGB value translations in LR, the 0-100% scale provides all the useful information we need in a numeric scale, albeit, in this application, its not based on anything you'll ever see!

You could easily come up with some rough estimates of 0-100% values in Melissa RGB that should (key word should) provide pleasing skin tones. But why?

jfriend

arodney wrote:

Its easy! Just build a small library of images that you KNOW, based on output or experience that produces pleasing skin tones, use that as a visual reference.

The numbers? OK, what about the differences in those provided by Lightroom, ACR, and Photoshop (and the fact that in Photoshop, CMYK numbers are not based on the actual image encoding)?

Perhaps you know of a way to easily refer to other images in LR, but this is one place where LR has my stymied. It doesn't seem to let me open additional windows. It doesn't seem to let me pop over some other place and open another image in another directory without closing down everything I'm working on. If I'm in the middle of processing a long shoot and going through it with a custom filter and now I want to go look at some other images in some other place, is there any way to do that in LR without completely leaving what I'm currently doing? In Bridge, I'd just pop open a new window. Does LR have that capability?

arodney

jfriend wrote:

Perhaps you know of a way to easily refer to other images in LR, but this is one place where LR has my stymied. It doesn't seem to let me open additional windows. It doesn't seem to let me pop over some other place and open another image in another directory without closing down everything I'm working on. If I'm in the middle of processing a long shoot and going through it with a custom filter and now I want to go look at some other images in some other place, is there any way to do that in LR without completely leaving what I'm currently doing?

That be a good reason to use a Collection.

jfriend

arodney wrote:

That be a good reason to use a Collection.

A collection makes it easy for me to go to a different set of images. It doesn't make it easy for me to come back to what I was just working on after looking at it.

Do you know of any conceptual reason why LR chose to not let you have multiple windows each with their own view of something? I was very surprised they designed it that way and it's completely different than their other apps that deal with images.

If I'm in the middle of a workflow and then an interruption makes me need to go look up some other images, I'm kind of stuck. Or is there a better way to solve this problem?

arodney

jfriend wrote:

A collection makes it easy for me to go to a different set of images. It doesn't make it easy for me to come back to what I was just working on after looking at it.

Unless the image you're working with is in the collection. And you can remove it at any time.

So lets say we have a collection called "good skin tone examples". Now you could simply copy and paste some "skin tone" presets from that to newer images, or drag newer images into that collection to work with (and then keep a set of desired images corrected there or remove them).

Do you know of any conceptual reason why LR chose to not let you have multiple windows each with their own view of something?

I think its for simplicity and to move away from the "lots of open windows and palettes" concept, originally designed by Mark Hamburg the designer. That said, I wouldn't mind having multiple main windows (with panels fixed) at one time that I could toggle, but that's probably something we may never see or may see in version 3.0. I would argue that it would be useful to have multiple libraries open, but open with each fixed UI as we see it now. That might happen. This is after all, a 1.0 (or 2.0 beta) product.