I have posted pictures of “the heavies” in the past, and of pipe bands. Here is one of a single piper. It is good to see pipers who are a) not male and b) not white being accepted into bands. I suspect this young lady is learning to play the pipes at school and is sufficiently interested to join her local band.
One of the reasons for posting this is to ask about the colour balance module, which has a preset “basic colorfulness: natural skin”. What does “natural skin” mean? Can it be used for this picture, or for pictures of black people? If it can’t, then how do others edit images containing non-white people?
As I understand it, that preset is designed to work with filmic RGB in default settings, to simply add an appropriate amount of saturation, as filmic obviously leaves chroma untouched.
That being the case, I don’t think skin colour is really relevant - at least for me it doesn’t affect the amount of saturation I want.
That’s my view anyway!
Or those settings are related to what the author of the module thinks is reasonable? So “skin” as close to natural skin tones as possible (one model he often uses was non-caucasian), “standard” as a more saturated default? (many “standard” settings for camera jpegs look to me a bit too saturated, not good for skin).
Of course. But it still helps to figure out what the settings are supposed to mean.
As to @epeeist 's quesion: Those color balance presets only act on the saturation, so there shouldn’t be too much difference for different skin colours. Also, for my images the differences are rather subtle, so I just use the one I like best…
That preset only changes the following settings from neutral:
So, increase overall saturation; further boost saturation of shadows, but apply quite heavy desaturation to highlights. It does not make any assumption regarding the colour of the skin (there are no colour-specific adjustments). Still, darker-skinned people may/will have the saturation of their skin colour increased.
In having no colour-specific adjustments, this module preset is different from the like-named preset of color zones, which desaturates reds and shifts their colour a bit towards orange, regardless of lightness:
In DT you can tweak color and then use the picker and hover over the color…it will actually label skin tones as a quick reference and its not bad… you can adjust hue and luminance to get a match along with checking the position on the vectorscope for the skin…
Google is working in its software and phones to reproduce skin in a more accurate way… its is using something called the Monk scale…
You could use this swatch or another and try some spot color mapping to adjust…
Beautiful photo.
My play in GIMP. Apart from the crop, very small changes. Slight increase in contrast by adjusting the the black and white points. A little local increase in saturation to bring out the blue of the waistcoat, the colours of the tartan and slightly warm the flesh colours.
Beautiful photo, loving the color palette! I’m usually very happy with how Saulala handles skin tones, but this time I’m not too satisfied with the darkening of the subject’s lips.
I also use the memory banks on the camera to give me a base point for particular situations. For this one the bank I used is set for auto-ISO, a minimum shutter speed of 1/1000s, and continuous autofocus…
