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Skin tones by the numbers, a la Margulis and Varis...


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andreajava

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Currently trying to refine my color correction methods - finished reading "Skin" by Lee Varis and am now in the middle of "Photoshop Professional" by Margulis. I'm not a PS beginner, so I'm comfortable with their theories and equally comfortable with their methods. What I'm having an issue with is the results (at least for this particular image).
I set both the highlights and shadows to neutral. I then moved on to skin tones. The CMYK values told me that the cyan was too high (C 23, M 33, Y 40). I wanted to bump the magenta up a bit and take down the cyan to around 12-14. So, using the proper channels in a curves adjustment layer, the below image is the result. It's awful. Am I missing a really big piece to this puzzle? I know there are no "exacts" in color correction, but I should at least be in the ball park.

bad color.jpg
 
What about the picture do you not like? The skin tones themselves or what these corrections did to the rest of the image?

From my monitor it looks like there is too much yellow and she looks very golden but you could be looking at a very different picture just due to your monitor settings..

When making only slight skin tone adjustments its ok to not mask the skin tones off themselves but if your moving something overall 6-12% overall it's usually best to mask stuff out such as teeth, eyes, background....
 
It's definitely too red, in the skin tones and in the neutrals. But, if you look at the highlight and shadows values, they read that they ARE neutral. I can mask in the skin tones, but I didn't think I'd have to, as long as the "numbers were correct". I guess I need to keep reading, to see what other factors I might be missing.
 
If the numbers you had were at c 23 m 33 and y 40 the only thing you should do in my opinion is take down the cyan to 12-15%. Leave the magenta and yellow alone, outside of that, you maybe overthinking this. Color is by numbers to some degree but it should always come down to what visually looks best IMO.


Edit: Ok I zoomed into your image and looked at the measurement details, you need to drop the magenta back down to where it was and leave the cyan @ 14% at least with regards to skin tone.
 
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