I am searching for a way to change skin tones a little bit only, without changing the colors of the whole picture.
I am sorry, I am not allowed to post an example image. Imagine there is an underexposed photo with extreme backlight. A combination of tone equalizer and agx does a good job, but the skin of the person gets light gray when using the tone equalizer “in the middle” nearly to the maximum.
So my question is how can I modify the skin tones without making the colors more worse.
This is a rare situation. Maybe there is a module which has a setting with auto, which can be tried. Normally I keep it as it is, because I do it more worse most times.
These sorts of things are hard to answer because its best to demonstrate it from a baseline…if you can find an image that you can share maybe from signatureedits and then let people show you the various ways.
It will depend in this case by the sound of it on what you might need to prioritize in the image and what you sort of “let go” as its not really important…if the face and skin tones are important then the whole edit will focus on that and the approach will maybe be different than if you need some background or some certain elements in the photo also in a certain state. You will most likely need masking.
If the faces are going gray then you dont’ have much color or some adjustment is too strong…if you put the color picker on the face and use the vectorscope to analyse it then you will be able to see what you are working with…
There is a skin tone preset in the CLUT module mentioned by @Jetze There is a wide range of patches there that you can experiement editing directly or actually sampling you subjects skin and replacing a patch with that and then using the controls to try and tweak it… you might still want to mask depending on the colors in your image and whatelse might be influenced…
It is an underexposed (white) face under a tree with a very bright background (white wall mainly)
It doesn’t make sense to do a lot efforts. I am not happy with the skintones and I would iike to give the face a little bit more color. If this can be done easily it would be nice, if not, it is ok too.
Begin with the colour temperature (Colour Calibration Module). Warming up the picture can put life back into skin tones. It depends on what the rest of the picture will stand: you may or may not be happy, eg, with turning a midday photo into a sunset! Seriously, though: orange teeth or “whites” of eyes don’t look too good either.
Colour Balance RGB: Experiment with the basic sliders on the first tab. Use a mask to affect only the face.
You can almost certainly make changes without much effort. But it might take some effort to discover which changes to make. That’s worthwhile for the future. Occasionally, I keep difficult pictures that deserve to be culled just to see if I can save them and how.
When looking at subjects I often just put the exposure picker and draw a box on them or on the face and see where that lands me…it will set that in about the right range. Then I might raise or lower that and then I decide if I need the tonemapper in the image and if so then I will add and adjust it… without seeing the overall tonality of the image its pretty hard to suggest too much that will be specifically useful to you…
I wanted to do something similar to what you are asking. I had a jpg picture from my camera of two girls in Japan. I liked the skin tones produced in the JPG, but with my RAW file I got best contrast and shadow details, however the skin tone was not as nice as the JPG. I discovered that the primaries tab in AgX allowed me to do small rotations of the blue, green or red channels before tone mapping to warm the skin tone to match the JPG look. I have also found with landscapes that I can use the blue boost after tone mapping to better render my blue skies in landscapes.
This is fine if your image can take it ie global changes like that but this might also be where you would use the primaries module with masking if it just skin tones
If not, it sounds like your scene may have had two different light colors. You might try duplicating the color calibration module and applying a mask for the face. You could also use the inverse of that (raster) mask in the next instance so the two modules are working separately instead of the latter undoing the work of the previous module.
I also like to reduce the opacity or decrease the chroma of the CC module to keep more yellow in the photo.
Probably not too popular opinion, but if there’s an extreme backlight and the skin is becoming gray and unnatural, I think maybe you’re lifting the shadows a bit too much or going against the light of the scene…
An alternative approach could be letting the bg blow up and then play with the tone mapper, exposure/blur/contrast and mask to make the blown out bg look “artistic”, or at least pleasant.
Another thing that you can try is lifting the shadows with brilliance controls in color balance rgb. I usually find those more effective than tone EQ, probably because I am not very skilled with the latter.
Colour Balance RGB is almost one-module processing for many pictures. And, as I mentioned, basic use is easy. Wonderful module.
I’m never sure of the difference, but usually only use saturation. And yes, I know, I need to check out the documentation and other sources to which it refers, for the real meaning of these technical words.
The slider that puzzles me is global vibrance. It seems to combine saturation and contrast? Anyway, this is a digression…
Which other modules could be used to increase brilliance. Sometimes local contrast helps.
Don’t you miss the equalizer?
I had a photo with people on a frozen lake. Everything is fine (more or less), but the skin of the face is too dark. What could be used to make the skin tones lighter, but keep the other colors as exposed?
Without seeing the photo in question, masking comes to mind as a first try. But brightening just the faces might give a strange feel to the image, as they can appear too bright relative to the direct surroundings. Once you have the mask, many options are open, depending on what exactly you want to do (for simple brightening, exposure seems the right module).
