Help with skin tones on prints

DJ-S1 · October 10, 2006

I just ordered a bunch of team photos for my son's baseball team, and I'm not happy with the skin tones. Any help would be great to stop future errors - it's order 182415, lustre prints with auto color.

The faces look to me like those old time photos that were hand painted pale skin and rosy cheeks - know what I mean?

Here's my list of possible culprits, in order of likelyhood:

1. I screwed up the colors
2. I screwed up the colors
3. I had the colors okay, then auto color messed with them
4. lustre finish is somehow making the colors more pastel-y

The last game is Saturday morning so I'll still give these out, and probably nobody will notice but me. But as I said I really want to prevent this in the future so thanks in advance for the help!

I'm using a Viewsonic 19" widescreen LCD with Spyder2 calibration. I know that doesn't mean I had the colors right to begin with, just mentioning... I also re-read Baldy's guide to skin tones, but I must admit I'm not totally getting it :scratch

Here's the 2 photos -

Andy · October 10, 2006

stby, I'm looking

Andy · October 10, 2006

Andy wrote:

stby, I'm looking

OK I have corrected your photos.

A few things:

1) they are underexposed by about 2/3s stop - this is a common problem, monitors are brighter and brighter, but prints and the histogram in photoshop don't lie

Your orig was dark. Got to work on that

2) the lighting is tough - mixed - look under the caps -- very yellow

3) there's a color cast, needs to be neutralized (I used the photoshop curves grey dropper)

4) finally - the skin tones - yeah the first one was too much red- second one better but still too red. Our skin tone tute really works - try it again, and just be sure that the magenta is not higher than the yellow on the readout.

Notice all the yellow under each hat brim?

DJ-S1 wrote:

The last game is Saturday morning so I'll still give these out, and probably nobody will notice but me.

And me.

Not to worry though! You are fully covered and protected by the SmugMug Guarantee: http://www.smugmug.com/prints/our-guarantee.mg

I've already re-ordered all 30 of your 5x7 prints, and done with NEXT business day shipping so you'll have them this weekend. Of course, there's no charge for the correction service, or the 30 reprints.

I hope you find this satisfactory - and if there's anything at all we can do further on this, just let me know. It's our pleasure!

Andy · October 11, 2006

BTW, this is one of the best team photos I've seen in a long time - totally good stuff

Baldy · October 11, 2006

Andy wrote:

3) there's a color cast

We see so many too-blue-in-the-shade shots... Neither the white balance on the camera or autocolor seems to go far enough in cutting cyan and adding yellow.

Andy to the rescue.

Cameron · October 11, 2006

Andy - I don't mean to hijack the thread, but could you give a bit more detail about the steps you took to correct the image? It might help some of the rest of us avoid this problem.

Great photo DJ-S1

Cameron

pat.kane · October 11, 2006

Nice job on the retouch and I'm all for hearing your steps as well.

DJ-S1 · October 11, 2006

See, I knew it was me all along! Thanks for the excellent service, as always.

We see so many too-blue-in-the-shade shots...

I didn't see that page, makes perfect sense now. It was early afternoon with strong sun; I placed them just inside the shade with the bright grass in front so I could get some light on their faces. I guess that was good and bad - it added a cast that I didn't notice even though I was looking for it.

I don't think flash would have helped much, since I only have the 20D onboard flash available and I was a fair distance away.

As for underexposing, I dialed that down based on the histogram! I think I tend to be timid about blowing out areas...

Thanks for the tips and the awesome Smugmug service, I appreciate all the help!

Andy · October 11, 2006

DJ-S1 wrote:

Thanks for the tips and the awesome Smugmug service, I appreciate all the help!

You are very welcome - it's truly our pleasure! I checked with our lab, that order is being printed today and getting out today.

Baldy · October 11, 2006

Andy wrote:

I checked with our lab, that order is being printed today and getting out today.

What he means is he strong-armed the lab...
:whip

I saw the email.

DJ-S1 · October 11, 2006

I have no doubt - you know you've got the best house pro going, right Baldy?

Baldy · October 11, 2006

DJ-S1 wrote:

I have no doubt - you know you've got the best house pro going, right Baldy?

He's amazing. We all joke that he's taking something, crack I guess, to keep up the pace he does. We're in awe.

bow

j-bo · October 12, 2006

Baldy wrote:

He's amazing. We all joke that he's taking something, crack I guess, to keep up the pace he does. We're in awe.

bow

AWE.

The AWE to me is the excellent service handed out by ANDY and SmugMug! I still cross my fingers that my competition NEVER comes here! Sorry, but I'm selfish!

Most excellent service!

Andy · October 12, 2006

Everyone, and thanks for the kind words. I'm truly living the dream, my work is my passion.

OK Onwards to the steps I used here.

First, the exposure. The shots are underexposed. There are several ways you can bring up the exposure in Photoshop, either with the "Exposure" slider or the Curves tool (or levels, too, but I use curves). For this image, I used the curves tool, white dropper, and hit on one of the whitest (but not pure white) areas and voila, the exposure was darn near perfect. You should just try it, till you get it "right." Of course, getting it right, requires a good calibrated system.

Next, I used the levels trick for skin tones, outlined in our help page on skin tones. It's dead simple, and works every time. The extra step I do, is to work on an adjustment layer, so I can mask away everything BUT the faces. Easy to do, dump paint bucket of black on the layer mask, and then use white brush or eraser, and paint over the faces while the layer mask is active.

I then used the same technique, but with the color balance layer, to remove some of that yellow under the hats. Again, a dead simple approach.

Here are some handy resources for the above:

http://www.smugmug.com/help/skin-tone
http://www.smugmug.com/help/blue-skin-tones

and on our tutorials site, see the "pop" tutes and the layer mask tutes.

Holler with any qeustions

olegos · October 13, 2006

Andy, so you fixed all 30 of his images in Photoshop, re-uploaded, and reordered without auto corrections (in "True Color"), did I get that right?

SteveM · October 13, 2006

Baldy wrote:

What he means is he strong-armed the lab...
:whip

I saw the email.

...And that's why we love him (even though his Avatar gives me the booboojeebeez!) He's our Mole, fighting The Man for photographers everywhere.

He's a baaaddd mother...(shutcho mouth!). I'm just talkin' bout Andy.

Andy · October 13, 2006

olegos wrote:

Andy, so you fixed all 30 of his images in Photoshop, re-uploaded, and reordered without auto corrections (in "True Color"), did I get that right?

well, it was two images, printed 15 times each

but yeah that's what I did

But we'd do the same if it were 30, or 300 different images.

DJ-S1 · October 13, 2006

I received the shots yesterday, much improved and much appreciated.

I went back to the RSE adjustments I made on the shots and the exposure slider was set at -.65; gee I wonder why the shots were 2/3 stop underexposed? What happens is that I see areas are "blown", in this case the lettering on the jerseys, and I adjust down a bit so that's not the case. I don't get rid of ALL overexposed areas, but I do try to minimize them. Mistake #1.

I just plain didn't notice the color cast - mistake #2.

The only thing I did right was use Smugmug!

jfriend · October 13, 2006

What I do in this case

DJ-S1 wrote:

I received the shots yesterday, much improved and much appreciated.

I went back to the RSE adjustments I made on the shots and the exposure slider was set at -.65; gee I wonder why the shots were 2/3 stop underexposed? What happens is that I see areas are "blown", in this case the lettering on the jerseys, and I adjust down a bit so that's not the case. I don't get rid of ALL overexposed areas, but I do try to minimize them. Mistake #1.

I just plain didn't notice the color cast - mistake #2.

The only thing I did right was use Smugmug!

Something I do fairly often when developing my RAW files is to adjust the exposure slider to preserve highlights, then use one of the mid-tone adjustments (curve or something else in your favorite RAW editor) to bring up the mid-tones until it looks visually pleasing. Done right, you get the best of both worlds.

Help with skin tones on prints

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