Skin Tones

[Gord Bullied]

I am using PSP13 and have a couple of pictures that I find the skins tones are slightly off. Can anyone suggest what conbination of RGB is best for skin tones or.. is there some add-on that will give me the ability to make subtle adjustments.
many thanks in advance

[LeviFiction]

Well, there is no one value that you need but I learned all of what I think I know in CMYK not RGB. So doing some quick conversions I can tell you that you need to have RGB set-up as follows.

Green and Blue have to be pretty close together, as far as light is concerned all human races have Green and Blue reflecting at around the same amount.

Red has to have a higher value than both Green and Blue.

Red > ( Green = Blue)

For adjusting color tones I learned to use the curves command. So you can easily use Paint Shop Pro's curves command to make the necessary adjustments.

What you need to do is grab a pen and some paper or use a program like notepad to keep track of some values. You use the eye-dropper tool with a sample size of about 5x5 (we do this to average out the colors and make sure we aren't sampling a single pixel of digital noise) and sample the skin you want to adjust, then write down the RGB values. We'll be using them to determine the best edit options.

So let's say I have an image and my sample has the colors

R: 204
G: 186
B: 205

So to match our requirements specified above we look at our numbers. Red is higher than green, which is good, but it's lower than Blue. Also Red and Blue are closer together but we need Blue and Green to be closer together. So the best way to approach this image is to decrease the blue value to get closer to the green value.

I use curves for this because it's great for adjusting the single values and getting similar values to change dramatically and dissimilar values to change only slightly. which keeps most of the image looking closer to the original while changing the skin-tones.

Now for editing the curves I recommend using the curves adjustment layer as you can edit it multiple times until you get it right.

In the curves command you select the blue channel and set a point.


Use the left & Right arrow keys to move the point to the required value. In this case we want a point at 205 because that's what our sample point was.
You will see the number and its new value displayed in the upper left corner of the graph. It should look something like this (205 > 180) with whatever numbers they are.


The 205 is the value you're editing and the 180 is the value it's going to become. Once you have the value for blue selected use the up and down arrows to start nuding it into the proper place. I ended up with a new value of 182.

With that I got rid of the blue color cast that had occurred on my image.

My end result in RGB was

R: 204
G: 186
B: 182

Which meets our requirements of Red being Higher than Green and Blue and both Green and Blue are fairly close together.

[Gord Bullied]

Well, there is no one value that you need but I learned all of what I think I know in CMYK not RGB. So doing some quick conversions I can tell you that you need to have RGB set-up as follows.

Green and Blue have to be pretty close together, as far as light is concerned all human races have Green and Blue reflecting at around the same amount.

Red has to have a higher value than both Green and Blue.

Red > ( Green = Blue)

For adjusting color tones I learned to use the curves command. So you can easily use Paint Shop Pro's curves command to make the necessary adjustments.

What you need to do is grab a pen and some paper or use a program like notepad to keep track of some values. You use the eye-dropper tool with a sample size of about 5x5 (we do this to average out the colors and make sure we aren't sampling a single pixel of digital noise) and sample the skin you want to adjust, then write down the RGB values. We'll be using them to determine the best edit options.

So let's say I have an image and my sample has the colors

R: 204
G: 186
B: 205

So to match our requirements specified above we look at our numbers. Red is higher than green, which is good, but it's lower than Blue. Also Red and Blue are closer together but we need Blue and Green to be closer together. So the best way to approach this image is to decrease the blue value to get closer to the green value.

I use curves for this because it's great for adjusting the single values and getting similar values to change dramatically and dissimilar values to change only slightly. which keeps most of the image looking closer to the original while changing the skin-tones.

Now for editing the curves I recommend using the curves adjustment layer as you can edit it multiple times until you get it right.

In the curves command you select the blue channel and set a point.


Use the left & Right arrow keys to move the point to the required value. In this case we want a point at 205 because that's what our sample point was.
You will see the number and its new value displayed in the upper left corner of the graph. It should look something like this (205 > 180) with whatever numbers they are.


The 205 is the value you're editing and the 180 is the value it's going to become. Once you have the value for blue selected use the up and down arrows to start nuding it into the proper place. I ended up with a new value of 182.

With that I got rid of the blue color cast that had occurred on my image.

My end result in RGB was

R: 204
G: 186
B: 182

Which meets our requirements of Red being Higher than Green and Blue and both Green and Blue are fairly close together.

Many Thanks - I will give it a try..

[Gord Bullied]

Thanks once again. This is the first time I've used curves... not quite sure if I understand exactly what I'm doing but....was quite impressed with the flexibilty it provides. When in the Curves adjustment layer how do I know my sampling size? Outside of this layer I can set it but within the layer it is not shown.

[LeviFiction]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean but I think you're referring to the eye-dropper symbols inside the adjustment layer dialog. Don't use those ones. Use the actual eye-dropper tool when getting the sample information.

The eye-droppers inside the curves dialog are for setting your white, gray, and black points. These allow for an automatic color cast correction as it adjusts the colors so that the white area looks white, the gray area looks gray, and the black area looks black. Really handy, but it's not for our purposes here.

[Gord Bullied]

That makes more sense... and it is the way I used it. Thanks

[ronzie]

http://www.wallkillcolor.com/

Go to the Munsell Data Files section. Grab the free Digital GretagMacbeth ColorChecker jpeg and the free
Digital GretagMacbeth ColorChecker Data Tables

There are two flesh color patches and in the data conversion chart you have the rgb and other colorspace values for the chart values.

This is the digital version of the reference chart often shot by film photographers as the first shot in the frame for photo processing printer pro shops to calibrate on. It is based on "colors of nature" and some neutral reflectance patches.

You can try to match these chart values with those in your image editing as a start to getting good flesh tones and other natural colors as described in the patch descriptions in the data chart.

I've had it in a protected case the color chart for about fifteen years using it to establish editing references for my old non-color managed editor.

The 24 patch chart hard copy chart is available from references posted at

http://www.munsellstore.com
/default.aspx?act=catalog.aspx?category=Munsell+ColorChecker+Charts&subcategory=ColorChecker+Charts&showinactive=1&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

as is the digital color checker chart with lots of patches for you to shoot with your digital camera. It is a lot more expensive than the chart above, however.

http://www.xritephoto.com/ sells many charts directly with documentation. Just highlight products and click the charts of interest.

These charts are available from listed dealers and you might find them locally.

If you include the 24 patch chart in the same light as your subject you'll have a reference to get your initial color balance corrections on. Then the rest of your shots will vary naturally in that same light situation.

The reference illumination for that chart is the day of the summer solstice in June noon standard time with a clear sky and the chart facing north in an open area.

You can get some free test target images from:
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/down ... _page.html
to get some flesh tone values from as well. The one with the bottom row of three infants and a woman's face plus a grayscale on the right I use to evaluate printer color profiles in soft proof mode and then printing.

[Gord Bullied]

WOW.... great information. Many Thanks

[GMack]

Old thread, but I got new Lee varis "Skin II..." book where the instructions are to use the dropper tool set to CMYK and not RGB.

Any way to make it read CMYK and not RGB? I know CS6 can change between the two, but what about PSP X8?

Tia.

Mack

[LeviFiction]

No. PSP still only has HSL and RGB. PSPX7 and X8 can let you set CMYK values but otherwise nothing else.

EDIT:

I feel stupid.

So, if you open up the color selector dialog and set the slider view to CMYK, then click inside the image you'll see the CMYK values in the Color dialog. Now, this still isn't having PSP actively show you CMYK values with the eye-dropper. Those are still restricted to HSL and RGB. But it's much faster than the two previous methods I suggested.