Hey all,
I am frequently struggling with photos where the skin tones are the brightest parts of the image. E.g. overcast lighting with people (my son :-D) against vegetation. I have a hard time to bring some pop to those photos. Placing the middle gray on the skin tones makes everything look dull and crushes the blacks.
Does anyone have a process for those kinds of lighting conditions? I am aware that badly lit photos are hard to rescue but maybe someone has some universal thoughts on this :-). Using scene referred default in dt.
Thanks!
Not knowing the skin tone, I cannot say it for sure, but you may have to make it brighter.
In color balance rgb, you can set the contrast pivot around the skin tone, and apply contrast there.
Caucasian skin (especially children) can be at least one stop brighter than middle gray. And a face usually has some variation in tone (shadows/highlights), even in “shadowless” light. That’s not to say you should make most of the face white!
Without see an example of your processing it is challenging to suggest a solution, but I personally use sigmoid rather than filmic as the default tone mapper because sigmoid gives brighter colors straight out of the box. You would find it a really good exercise to find an image that you could post as a play raw to see various editing approaches.
Also, consider exploring the darktable styles that may have been created for your model camera. These are probably filmic based but should give an informative starting point for your images.
I was inspired by the Darktable camera sytles and I am creating my own for my cameras based upon comparing a raw file edit to the camera’s jpg. My raw edits exceed the jpg for fine detail and shadow detail so I am not chasing the jpg quality but rather using the color, contrast and saturation of the jpg as a starting point for my edits. It has helped a lot to speed up my workflow.
Sometimes I use a second instance of color calibration in channel mixer mode (see presets). Then in the brightness tab I lower the input red brightness and I check “normalize channels”. This will lower the reds while keeping the average brightness constant.
