Photoshop Mama's Setting Skin Tone

Setting Skin Tone Okay, the next step that I am going to do is, do a little bit of tonal color correction. Usually we like to see portrait images with a warm temperature balance but we may want to offset that a little bit with more of a normal daylight type of balance. And a quick tip to do that is we are just going to call upon the levels adjustment layer and again, we are working our way up. So, with the light powders group highlighted, I am going to click on the add fill adjustment icon at the bottom of the layers pallet, and I am just going to dial in levels. You could do levels or curves, but if you have Photoshop elements, you will need to do level. So, we will just use levels. When the levels dialogue box opens up, what we are going to be using is the gray eyedropper, this one right in the middle. But you want to check to make sure that the target color for this is absolutely neutral. So to set that target, just double click on that middle eyedropper and it will open up the mid tone color, color picker, it says select target, mid tone color. Now what you want to make sure, is that over here in the R, Gand B fields that they all read out at 128 and if they do, you are set to go. If not, change them. Click okay. And so now that target mid point is set. The next thing that we want to do, is to neutralize the image, is to find an area of neutral color. Now I could click on the background and I am going to click that because that is supposed to be a white background and that will neutralize the image. But I am going to undo that. I am going to hold down my Alt key on a PC, option on the Mac that changes the cancel button to reset so I do not have to back out of this. And I am going to zoom in on the eye area for the eye whites because that is closer to the face. And I am going to pick a part of the white. Now, in her eyes, she has got a little bit of the yellow spec here. I do not want to click that. I want to click in an area of the white of the eye that should be a neutral color. So I will do something like that and click Okay. Now, what I am going to do is shut this off temporarily and add some sampler points so that we can analyze the color. Even though your monitors are calibrated or you think they are, it is always a good idea to double check on the actual number values. So I am going back to the eyedropper tool and get the color sampler tool, and I am going to put a sampling point not in the rosy cheek area, but right up here where it is more of a skin color. I will click one there, and then I will click one up in the forehead shadow area, right here, number two. And I will come down here to the back area, and click a third sampler point. Now what I am going to do is I am going to change my read outs because it is easier to analyze skin color looking at the CMYK values. It is for me anyway, rather than the RGB read outs. Because it is hard to get your head wrapped around the fact that red and green make yellow and you have got these other sampler points to make it easier. So I am going to click on this little tick mark on the number one and change it to CMYK, and I am going to do that in the other two sampler points. Changing them all to a CMYK read out. And what we are looking for, when we analyze these color numbers, we are just looking at the magenta and yellow color read outs here. And normally a good Caucasian skin tone is going to have an equal amount of magenta and yellow. Or, just a few points more yellow than magenta, not too much but you can go up to 10. But it is still better to get them more equal. So if we are looking at number one here, we can see that currently without any adjustment that we have got a stronger yellow here in the number one read out and a stronger yellow in number two, and a stronger one in number three. So what we are going to do is turn levels back on and you can see that these numbers have changed. Now what has happened is the magenta is hotter in number one, and greater in number two, and equal in number three. So we are going to try and come up. We are going to zoom back out here. Just like I said we do prefer a warmer skin tone and so that would be with a little bit more yellow. How we are going to tweak these skin tone numbers is on this levels adjustment layer, we are going up to the global opacity, and we are going to back off on it a bit. And then read those numbers. And now we are getting into more of an area where it is combining that cooler filtering that levels did with the warmer, and we are getting our numbers into a target area of that peachy skin color. So I am down to 69%, let us go down a little bit more to 53 and see what is going on here. See the further I back off, the more yellow it gets. And I want the magenta and yellow to be pretty close and so, let us say at 62, I think we are going right about here, 64. Again, it is a matter of taste but let me shut the visibility off. So now, it looks extremely yellow and now we are getting more of a peachy skin color. So in that number one area that is under the eye, we have just got two points higher in yellow than magenta which is good. And in the number two area, which is on the forehead, we have one point higher in yellow which is good. And on the back area, we have got three points higher in yellow. So this is a good little mix of skin tone color.