Skin Tone Correction

[phatso]

I have been trying to sort out in my head how to get skin tones corrected, then i stumbled upon the following explanation

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

I had a play with a shot i took the other day, the model was fairly fair skinned but showed up quite red in the shots under the lights.

The tweaked shot looked ok on my monitor in photoshop but once exported and uploaded looked really red. So i went though the guide above and dropped things to 6% cyan 18% magenta 24% yellow and with a layer mask only applied that to the skin area's.

Can anybody offer some points on both the shot over all but more specifically with the skin tones.

Unedited:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4035/4350168054_9a9b22dc3d.jpg

Tweaked:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4046/4350164852_b78bea648d.jpg

Attempted Skin Tone Correction:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4031/4349419245_4e4edaaeed.jpg

[10megapixel]

Before you shoot, custom set your WB properly and shoot in RAW if your not already. The image you have here looks underexposed to start with which is going to make it that much more difficult to adjust the skin tones in post processing.

[phatso]

WB was custom set under the lights and the image was shot in raw, i agree its a fraction under though.

The tweaked one was brought up about 1 stop exposure in raw among other things before being played with in photoshop to bring out the eyes and smooth the skin a little.

[jetcode]

It is important to convert image color profiles to sRGB for web browsers. That should take care of the color shift from monitor to browser. The WB must be set right as mentioned above.

[navydoc]

Hope you don't mind, here's my attempt. I adjusted the levels first, removed the bg, did a little skin smoothing and did a curves adjustment.

[10megapixel]

^^^Good Job!^^^

[StormDriven]

great edit navydoc

[cpforyou]

Looks great. If only there was a tutorial for Lightroom.

[phatso]

Been back and started again from the original, what do you think of this 2nd edit?

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4017/4351444719_4993227cf2.jpg

[PixelPusher]

Quite an improvement. Navydoc set the bar pretty high for a natural look. Maybe take out the red in her hair on the sides some to make it blend in better. It is really getting there though!

[navydoc]

Much better. Her skin looks much more even now without harsh highlights. The only thing I did to her skin tone was to click on the gray bg before I removed it to set the gray point for the image using the levels adjustment.

[kilbsy]

I also had a go, using the method that NavyDoc suggested. I can never get skintone right either and I am wondering if it is because my editing is done in photshop on a mac. They look different in browsers. The file looks good on my screen. (perhaps slightly yellow but I thought it went well) I added a background just to check my cut out. Is this ballpark acceptable? I have been using photoshop for years and am now trying to learn retouching for my own portraits, any criticism welcome! I hope the original poster didn't mind me editing this!

[kilbsy]

I also had a go, using the method that NavyDoc suggested. I can never get skintone right either and I am wondering if it is because my editing is done in photshop on a mac. They look different in browsers. The file looks good on my screen. (perhaps slightly yellow but I thought it went well) I added a background just to check my cut out. Is this ballpark acceptable? I have been using photoshop for years and am now trying to learn retouching for my own portraits, any criticism welcome! I hope the original poster didn't mind me editing this!

I added a gaussian blur and some contrast to the background image on the second image.