Skin tone pitfall

I hope open source raw editors don’t fall into the perfect skin tones pitfall, and remain powerful and generic enough to allow whatever skin tones are there to shine.
By the way, this image was taken while I was preparing to shoot this other one, when Miguel suddenly filled up all field of view and urged me to shoot him. According to his brother, he’s kind of a display guy.

I managed to give him these two versions after that.

DSC_7895_01

DSC_7895_02

DSC_7895.nef (19.0 MB)

This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.

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How would you define skin tone pitfall. As long as all the color tools are there you can make the skin tone whatever you want no?? Matched to the light or artistic or whatever?? The pitfalls would be the decision of the user to go down some road not a problem of the software??

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Out of the camera it looks to be pretty much “text book” skin tones if you just denoise to remove the color noise and kill the default midtone boost / bump in filmic which enhances the yellow hues considerably. That’s a pretty good starting point but it demonstrates how the default setting in filmic in this case will determine/contribute significantly to the final result for that aspect of the skin tone. I think it is why starting very neutral is really a benefit for color grading and its a good example of a setting in this case controlled by the user that will impart a look to the skin tone the degree to which the user wants to match the scene or apply a creative or artistic look.

Default with denoise filmic no midtone saturation
image

just add the midtone sat back at the default

image

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I think I wrongly assumed that some commercial software was bragging to have a tool to perfect white skin tones, but it’s seems to be a flawed assumption, I realize now.
I’m referring more specifically to the article mentioned by another user in another thread, where we’re presented to the Skin Tone tool from Capture One.
By reading the article (I should have done it before creating this thread), the tool seems to be ethnicity-neutral.
Thank you for having questioning about that. :+1:
Tough, extremely polarized times we’re living in (specially where I live). Sometimes, in trying to counteract it, we end up making things worse.

I hear you it’s such a shame

This looks pretty true to me, but the lighting of the image is pretty strange, so I had to select a different (from my usual) color calibration setting to get it. The man’s skin and the woman’s both look natural to me.

dt 3.4.1

DSC_7895.nef.xmp (6.9 KB)

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Absolutely! Your edit looks very natural to me.

You’re right, a bunch of tarps spreading above our heads to protect vendors and public from the harsh sun, producing that strange light you’ve noticed.

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Ironically I agree the edit is fine but on my phone and I guess my eyes I feel like there is a hint of green in the skin. It will be interesting to look on my monitor…but it illustrates another point of editing that being you might still present something on someone else’s hardware that doesn’t match yours or your eye for the tone vs theirs. I think that is where the scopes come in and are great reference tools to summarize what you have and to be sure it is matching up with what you see…


DSC_7895.nef.xmp (9.7 KB)

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Nice job on exposure, WB and shine on the skin…lighting on the van matches nice too as it captures the light…

I think Camera WB did quite a good job here. I only lifted temperature a bit.


DSC_7895_RT-1.jpg.out.pp3 (14.5 KB)

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