How to smooth up colors?

[zorglub76 (Marko Marjanović)]

I don’t know what’s the term for the thing I want to do, so let me try to explain:
I have a portrait, and the skin has brownish and pinkish patches of color. Is there a way to smooth these into a more uniform shade?
If you ever worked with CaptureOne, it has the color editor where you can choose a range of colors, and then use “Smoothness” slider to make selected range even.
I tried using “Color lookup table” and “Color equalizer” in Darktable, but couldn’t do what I wanted…

[zorglub76 (Marko Marjanović)]

Don’t know how to edit my post, but I was thinking about “Uniformity” slider in CaptureOne, not “Smoothness”

[zorglub76 (Marko Marjanović)]

Example: https://youtu.be/DVH_XsogjnY?si=jnjThplRwUrimLax&t=886

[Pascal_Obry]

Use the Blur module and set the blending mode to Chromacity, set blur radius to something like 30px and it should be ok.

[Donatzsky (Nis Donatzsky)]

@zorglub76

but I was thinking about “Uniformity” slider in CaptureOne, not “Smoothness”

Next release will have Color Harmonizer, which can be used for that.

[New module] [Merged] Color harmonizer

Hi all, A couple of days ago, I started playing around with the idea of a module to simplify working with color harmonies. After a few iterations with Gemini and Claude (due to quota limitations they had to come to terms with each other) I came up with this: It is pretty straightforward: you select an “anchor” hue, then you choose the harmony type, and then you play with the slider to push all the hues more or less aggressively towards the target hues. If you push the power and width sl…

[Terry (Terry Pinfold)]

Any chance of sharing an image as a playraw. I appreciate portraits may be more challenging to share. I would be interested in seeing how the new color harmonizer would work for this. I would even be interested to see what Capture One achieved to have an example of what is wanted.

[Wilecoyote]

For Portraits, my usual tools to do this are (depending on the use case):

1. Color Equalizer → Adjust the skin tones to have the same hue. Quick and easy - masking may be useful to only affect skin
2. Contrast Equalizer: Maximize different chroma scales until you find the one that represents the problematic structures. Reset the curve and maximize the denoising (the nodes at the bottom of the graph) for that scale
3. Retouch: For localized and / or frequency-specific alterations. Possibly with chroma blending mode
4. The new color harmonizer is basically a two-click solution for this.

[zorglub76 (Marko Marjanović)]

Herе’s the example: How to smooth up colors? - #3 by zorglub76

And probably any portrait without makeup would have different color areas. Basically, the “Uniformity” slider in CaptureOne works as makeup - it evens those different tones.

[akgt94]

Bruce Williams covers the retouch module. Including skin retouching

[123sg (Steven)]

Have you tried colour zones?
It’s similar to color EQ but can offer slightly more fine grained control.

[priort (Todd Prior)]

One trick that I use sometime for faces that have cheeks that are too red or some other issue is to use the color zones module…The auto picker there has a feature that if you hold the shift key while drawing an ROI on the your image that it will produce a curve that will desaturate around the selected hue or whatever your selection criteria is and fade that out. You can then use the mix slider or opacity to further tweak it or even step in and tweak the curve that it generates… If you use ctrl you can do the same things but in the reverse…this is the “boosting” curve… It might be worth playing with…it can be a nice tweak for local color casts to manipulate them as well…