Colors in photos: natural skin tones

Natural skin color is a constant headache for many people. Different cameras reproduce colors differently. Nikon, for example, has been labeled as producing yellow images, while Canon has been labeled as producing red ones. People also say Canon's colors are much better and more natural. If you shoot JPG, this may actually matter. But if you read my website, you probably know what I think about shooting JPG: it is suitable only as a final format after retouching, not as source material before editing.

You shoot photographs like these as RAW files. If anyone does not know what RAW is, it is the digital equivalent of film or a negative. It is a raw file, untouched by in-camera processing, that you develop in Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom, Capture One and so on. You can change every parameter applied to the photograph after pressing the shutter button in the RAW file: contrast, white balance, color space and so on. A JPG file has eight bits per channel. RAW varies with the settings and camera, but it is usually 12 to 14 bits. It contains incomparably more information, so you can brighten shadows by several EV, for example. Depending on the manufacturer, RAW files have different extensions, not only *.raw as in Panasonic cameras. Nikon uses *.nef, for example, and Canon uses *.cr2.

You set the camera to save RAW files when you first take it out of the box, then never touch that option again. Once you have RAW files, you can do anything with the colors. This is where the myth appears that it is easier to get natural colors from Canon files during editing. I completely disagree. I will show you how colors should be controlled, and the camera used to take the photograph will not matter. I do not use a ColorChecker, and I develop RAW files in the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).

If someone tells you it is impossible to get color from a Nikon that looks as good as color from a Canon, that does not mean it is impossible. It means that person does not understand the basics of editing.

Some of you may not know this yet, but RAW processing programs ignore the settings you chose in the camera. It does not matter whether you set the profile in the camera body to neutral or high contrast. The sharpening, color saturation and color space you chose, whether sRGB or Adobe RGB, do not matter either. The only setting taken into account is white balance. How the photograph looks after you open it in a RAW processor, whether Lightroom, ACR or Capture One, depends on the settings you defined as defaults in those programs. If you have not changed them, the program still will not load the camera settings. It will use the defaults chosen by its developers. The manufacturer's software is the exception. For Nikon, that means ViewNX, which comes with the camera, and Capture NX, which can also be purchased separately. As I mentioned, I use ACR. It is a plugin included with Photoshop. The other RAW processors have functions very similar to the ones I will describe, while Lightroom uses the same processing engine, simply wrapped in a different interface and expanded with additional options.

White balance

I probably do not need to say much here. Correct white balance is fundamental and should be the first thing you set after opening a photograph. I shoot almost all my photographs with flash and only need to correct it occasionally. When a correction is necessary, you can make it with the sliders for this setting, or sample a spot that should be gray or white and free of any color cast. In practice, sampling does not work because there is always some kind of cast. The best approach is to take one photograph during the shoot specifically for setting white balance. The model holds a gray card in that photograph, letting you set white balance later without any trouble by sampling its color.

Camera profiles

This is definitely one of the most important options when I process RAW files, yet many people do not even know it exists. You select the camera profile in the "Camera Calibration" tab:

The "Camera Calibration" tab and the list of profiles for the Nikon D700

If I used the yellow slider, the makeup would change color dramatically before I got the skin tone I wanted. That is because skin is orange-yellow with some red as well, especially in the cheeks, while the makeup is clearly yellow. If the skin is too red, you should still use the orange slider, but move it to the right rather than the left.

The "HSL/Grayscale" section is divided into three tabs. The one shown in the screenshot above controls hue. Moving the yellow slider changes yellow toward either red or green. The second tab controls saturation, where I decide whether a color should be intense or faded and washed out. The final tab, which controls luminance, is also very useful. If I adjust orange there, I control the highlights on the skin. I move the slider to the left to reduce them, making it easier to increase contrast later.

See it in the video

In the video below, I explain these points along with several other matters:

This video is part of a complete course on professional photo retouching in Photoshop. It also includes a separate video about color, as well as calibration and other topics.

Photoshop

With the standard setting, Master, every change affects the entire photograph. But you can change that by selecting the color you want. From then on, both the hue and saturation sliders affect only the selected color. There is no orange option here, but it does not matter if moving the red or yellow slider also changes the color of the lips, dress or anything else that should remain untouched. We are no longer in Camera RAW but in Photoshop, so you only need to paint over the unwanted areas on the layer mask and you are done.

Summary

My website certainly will not revolve around retouching, but around lighting. I may occasionally cover some basics. Skin color puzzles many people, so I decided to write about it now. There are other ways to correct skin color, but the one I have shown is simple, effective and quick because it usually does not require a mask. Adjusting colors is only one of many stages of editing, and even this part of retouching is much broader because it also includes local corrections and more. But that is a topic for another discussion.