Post-processing help for skin tones...

It seems like the last two or three of my outdoor portrait sessions have had one person with really white skintones that wash out badly. To fix it in ACR leaves the rest of the image seriously dark, including the more "normal" second person. Does anyone have any advice? Fill flash makes it worse. This example is from this weekend, no flash, cloudy overcast skies. Thanks for any words of wisdom.

This has happened to me before, I am very basic with PS7. I did a selection with the lighter face and adjusted the briteness/contrast on it, it worked OK but I will bet there are much better ways!

You should develop an organized workflow and learn proper application of each of the ACR adjustments. First you need to do a white balance. In the sample image, it appears that you have added way too much saturation and contrast. Also, the huge amount of Recovery adjustment implies that highlights were severely blown out, in which case, the recovered image will never be as good as a proper exposure. The book, "Real World Camera Raw" by Bruce Fraser is an excellent text for learning the nitty gritty of ACR.

If you would like to see an edit of the image, turn on the "IMAGE EDITING OK" permission in the user control panel.

Thanks very much Bill. You're right, I tried a lot to save this and similar images, mostly as the result of the light skintones. I turned on image editing so feel free to have at it. I appreciate any help you can give me.

I decreased the exposure and contrast in this edit. I also decreased the saturation considerably. I also created a new layer in which I lowered the brightness and exposure on the man's face. My main objective was to lower the strong contrast and color saturation in the faces. I did not concentrate as much on the clothing and background, so they might not have the correct amount of exposure or brightness, but that could easily be changed by creating adjustment layers.

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I created a solid color adjustment layer set to color mode, and painted over his face. The a second with a little red added in certain areas. Not perfect, but you'll get the idea.

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on the first edit.. i did a color burn on a new layer.. got it as close to brown as i could.. set the opacity, and fill to about 50% adjusted highlights a little. and thats that.. on the second one.. i did the same thing.. but on the forehead i samled the skin that was not blown out, added it to around the hairline. then smoothed it out a little.


original

Bill, Hawkeye, and Shanny. Thanks very much for your help. I'll try suggestions when I get back to it tonight. Now my big worry is what to do for their wedding when I have dozens like this. Yikes! Thanks again.

shannyD wrote in post #6615164
on the first edit.. i did a color burn on a new layer.. got it as close to brown as i could.. set the opacity, and fill to about 50% adjusted highlights a little. and thats that.. on the second one.. i did the same thing.. but on the forehead i samled the skin that was not blown out, added it to around the hairline. then smoothed it out a little.

I liked the second edited image. Could you elaborate how you did the second image or any link to the tutorial to achieve this would help. Thanks
how do you sample the skin?

tnicol wrote in post #6616019
Bill, Hawkeye, and Shanny. Thanks very much for your help. I'll try suggestions when I get back to it tonight. Now my big worry is what to do for their wedding when I have dozens like this. Yikes! Thanks again.

tell him to go to a tanning bed for the month before.. on a low setting.. ( only kidding of course)

sgogula wrote in post #6616060
I liked the second edited image. Could you elaborate how you did the second image or any link to the tutorial to achieve this would help. Thanks
how do you sample the skin?

on his forhead where there was still skin color available.. i used the clone tool, and started moving my way up to the hairline sampling, and blending as i went on... i did this to make sure i wasnt too splotchy.. on a full resolution photo it would have been better.

then from there i had a free plug in for skin smoothing for PSCS3. and used that just to soften my trail so it wasnt as noticeable.

the color burn.. go to layer/new fill layer ( click ok) then it brings up he area where you can choose a color, i chose what i liked. from there it turns your whole page that color that you chose.. from there where all of your layers are.. click on the bending options, and click on color burn. it will look really dark and contrasty..

from that point.. move your fill slider to your taste, and the opacity slider to your taste.. i chose a 50/50 blend.

and all of this was done on a seperate layer so i dont mess up the original.

no tutorial.. i pick up info as i read on the forum, and write it down.

shannon

My hunch is that this could be fixed better with two "exposures" in ACR, one for the man's face, the other or everything else.

But starting with your posted image, I first added a blank layer, changed blend mode to linear burn, painted on skin tones (sampled from the woman's face), masked out everything but the man's face, then adjusted layer opacity. Above that I also made a slight levels adjustment using the same mask (just pulled in the left-hand slider to darken the face a tad more).

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You could try creating a duplicate layer and applying a warming photographic filter from the image>adjustments menu. The opacity/strength of the chosen filter can be adjusted to get the right skin tones. Obviously these changes will affect the entire image, so once you have the skin tones you are happy with, you should apply a layer mask so that just the skin areas show through.

What I do fairly often is select the highlights to a new layer and change the blending mode to "multiply". Then lower the opacity to your liking. Then mask out the section you don't want to darken. This works well for me often in skin tone, but especially in landscapes.