Skin tones can be tricky. No one's skin is the same color and editing or color correcting can quickly become a guessing game simply because matching the real thing is sometimes difficult. There are a few things we can do to nail skin tone in camera; find good light, slightly overexpose, and shoot in RAW (adjust the white balance in RAW editor). These things will get you as close as possible to the real deal but when something doesn't quite work out as planned we can fix it! Early on in my editing days I stumbled upon an article that relayed a simple and straight forward way to be objective in correcting my skin tones, taking most of the guessing out of it. Lets see if I can reiterate it correctly :)
Starting with the original photo Kate posted we'll try and assess what the camera did in adjusting the temperature;
Looks cold to me right away. I imagine her skin being more bronze and there's a blue undertone instead of a golden/bronze tone. My camera shoots the same way, btw. Always slightly cold. You can adjust that in your settings but I've never been that eager to. You can also adjust your white balance but then I forget to change it back and end up overwarming sometimes so I leave that on auto. I don't mind editing it to just the right temperature in my RAW editor and trying different white balances in there as well. So let's start, we've got a cold photo, lets warm it up! Using photoshop I'll show you the run down but you can also do this in MANY other programs including elements.
First before I start warming I did a little curves adjustment to lighten the lights and darken the darks (this gets the proper skin exposure without blowing other things). I'll spare you those details right now but if you'd like to know more about that I can do another post. To do the warming I'll go into my curves window by selecting the half black half white circle at the bottom of my layers palette. You could also go to levels>new adjustment layer> curves.
I then drop down the preset menu at the very top and select custom. Then I go down just a smidge to the channel drop down and select red first. I grab a point right in the middle of the red line and pull it up so the line is slightly bowed.
Then I move to the blue channel and move the blue line down from the center so it bows opposite the red line;
If her skin turns too yellow move the blue line closer to the center or/and the red line farther away from the center. So now I have the original and the warmed/lightened version;
Now lets focus on her skin more closely. First thing is to notice the yellow tone. Since she is darker skinned she will naturally have a gold tone but we don't want it to go orange or yellow, just natural. To monitor this we can use our eye dropper tool and the info tab in the upper right corner. Using the dropper go over a small medium tone piece of skin, lets say her shoulder. you don't have to click or anything just use the mouse to go over her shoulder and watch the values in that upper right corner, specifically the CMYK values (that stands for Cyan, magenta,yellow and I have no idea what K is but we don't need it :). You'll notice that there is less than 10% cyan, about 18-20% magenta and 26-28% yellow. For tan skin I shoot for cyan over 10%, somewhere between 10-18%, for white skin it varies quite a bit depending on the hue. There's white/yellow, white/red and white/blue ;) To adjust these values go back to the half white and black circle and choose selective color (I'd show you but my photoshop isn't letting me circle things for some reason!). You'll see a colors drop down menu and I usually only play with red and yellow channels. Then adjust the magenta and yellow within those two colors. Ultimately you'll be changing the cyan values while changing these two colors. All of this, albeit more objective, still has to be looked at and evaluated based on what you saw when the camera snapped. Another thing that can cause orange is darkening the shadows too much. If you start out with tan skin, the darker you make it the more orange it will look. Same with red skin, if it starts pink it will turn red. Often times I will adjust the darks and lights and erase the skin at least a little bit to spare the color.
One trick to nailing skin exposure in camera and assessing the value of your light, be it good light or mediocre, is to look at your palm. Find a room that's lit only by a window and walk around looking at your palm. Go over to the window, your palm color looks nice right? It looks normal. Now slowly move away and notice your skin color will darken, shadow, change slightly in color just because of the light. Now go outside and find some open shade. Go to the very edge of the shade and notice how pretty your palm skin looks! Move all over inside the shade and out noticing how your palm is changing, how shadows are moving and how the colors are changing. This is obviously what happens to our subject during a shoot. We move them all over, turning here and there. In order to nail skin tones we have to watch them carefully and choose the best light possible. Here is my final edit. I would have left the horizontal crop but I wanted to just focus on the skin in this tutorial. Again, a lot of editing is subjective and contrast etc. is totally preference based but for me I like the most true to reality shot that I can manage even after edits. Thanks Kate for letting me use your photo! It's really beautiful! Hope that helps anyone frustrated with skin!
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