Pale Skintones

Being a beginner with the G1, and actually with photography in general, I think it would be good to have a dedicated place for the experienced users to come help the newbies if they wish.

And I'll start it out as well..

I often take pictures outdoors of people, but the skintones are a bit bright and pale. How can I help fix this problem? EV? Exposure time?

I hope this topic was appropriate for this part of the forum. I realize there is a "Taking Pictures" section, but I'll give this one a try anyway..

Exposure affects a lot: overexposure makes colors look washed and highlights are white, time of day and angle of the sun affects colors, too. But usually the problem is in white balance.

Best solution is to shoot in RAW and pick white balance later. There are ways to make skintones look better (make people healthier!) in PS but RAW does it easier.

Thanks Pekka..

Can't agree with you:

Zoombrowser can set only White Point, while PS - White, Black and Grey

PS is more comfortable, because I work with full picture rather than thumbnail, albeit big.

PS is much more faster.

Well, Zoombrowser (CRW Converter utility/TWAIN) works on 30-bit image, and it can be made look better with just the picker tool. Photoshop (I use 6.01) is of course more capable, but in order to make similar changes mere gray picker does not do it as TWAIN conversion seems to do something more (colorspace conversion etc?).

That's why I'd recommend at least to try and learn the CRW conversion. Shooting RAW helps in all cases by giving you options on sharpening and contrast (again in 30bit mode)

In Photoshop, I've done some good skintone warming by using levels RGB values separately, raise red level a bit, move green and blue gamma down a bit at equal value and then go to hue/saturation dialog to fix small tint errors in yellow and red. But in most cases RAW conversion does it as well.

No doubts, CRW is fine. I've been shooting in CRW last couple of days. But: I'm out of space !! It's (again) tooooo slow. And truly to say I don't see the principal differences in quality between CRW and SuperFine.
Albeit it may be arguable.

I'm for CRW + ZB:
-simple
-out of the box

Agaist:
-space consuming;
-slow;
-lack of capabilities of tuning

I'm for PS + SF:
-CMYK, LAB
-Curves;
-It can do everything

Against:
-requires a pretty good experience;
-it's monster, because it can do everything. But we don't need everything