PP Skintones Before and After

[Oz_Beachside]

Hi,
Just learning PP, how are my touch ups, and adjustments?

THanks, and appreciation the first 3 words that come into your mind, for critique. This was about 30 minutes work, early days.
BEFORE - PP



AFTER - PP


Regards,
Oz

[Justin]

Looks like she has a fake tan in the second, skin tones more natural in first

Also the highlights on her cleavage draw the eye... d'oh maybe that's just me ...too much in the second

First 3 words or so Oz.

[PiroStitch]

first one is better, probably just need to increase the brightness and it'll be fine.

[Critter]

aw, you got rid of her appendicectomy scar!

[Aussie Dave]

Oz,
- skin tone looks too warm (along with the background). Did you play with WB ?
- pink bathing suit looks overexposed or lacks detail (compared with the original)
- need more images

[gstark]

Oz.

What custom curves are you running in your camera? Do you have a copy of RawMagik?

[Oz_Beachside]

Oz.

What custom curves are you running in your camera? Do you have a copy of RawMagik?

Was shooting JPEG, learning basic lighting, posing, model instruction. WB was set to camera "cloud" in place of "flash" as per my WB tests.

New to curves, and no idea what RawMagik is...? More to learn.

[Oz_Beachside]

aw, you got rid of her appendicectomy scar!

Nope, was a dust bunny, but I thought same when I saw the images. I was scared to see it on my new Beast, but it was on the sensor, and blew off.

[Oz_Beachside]

Oz,
- skin tone looks too warm (along with the background). Did you play with WB ?
- pink bathing suit looks overexposed or lacks detail (compared with the original)
- need more images

I adjusted Levels, and I usually push way too much, I should work with the original side by side, so I can see how much I am changing it. I'll cool it down a little, and redo it tonight.

More images to follow, I want to get my adjustments better first, then batch process a group of them.

I'm sure the Melbourne Workshop will help a lot with my basic learnings/areas of improvement.

thanks
Oz

[Oz_Beachside]

Looks like she has a fake tan in the second, skin tones more natural in first

Also the highlights on her cleavage draw the eye... d'oh maybe that's just me ...too much in the second

First 3 words or so Oz.

THanks, agree, the tan color was due too much to my adjustments, so I'll take your feedback and redo tonight.

No highlights added, they were as the camera found them.

[Oz_Beachside]

I also used the Blur tool, across skin, to soften, as my technique for layer/masking and applying gaussian blur needs some time.

Any "Doctor Brown" online tutes, or shortcut tips?

Only so many hours in the day

[Matt. K]

Skintones far too warm. They don't look natural. WB set to cloudy when using flash is not a good idea in my book. You should be doing a WB preset off a 18% Greycard for natural colour and then warm the tones under control in Photoshop.

[surenj]

Agree with others re: too much warmness...

Try median filter to smooth skin and mask out the lips, eyes etc...

Could you make the background white? Maybe it will make her stand out more...

[Oz_Beachside]

thanks for the tips. Another quick go at it, less push on color, and levels, then using magnetic selection, then inverse selection, then applied Noise>Median, just a few pixel median.

Original


Second Effort

[christiand]

Silly question

ok, we see the images - but what were her real life colours like ?
When I was way back in reproduction photography for
ware house and fashion catalogues we fought for real life skin tones, which we were were mostly able to obtain from the colour slides.
Well, this not be of much help to you however as you have taken these photos you may be able to compare prints or so to true skin ?
All the PPed shots look a little too warm and bronzed to me.

Cheers,
CD

[sirhc55]

Oz - shoot RAW and not jpeg. You will have far more control in PP’ing

[Oz_Beachside]

Oz - shoot RAW and not jpeg. You will have far more control in PP’ing

Thanks Chris. I want to shoot RAW, but my PC seems to just grind to a halt when PP, so until my RAM arrives I am stuck with this

Cheers,
Oz

[Oz_Beachside]

How about this one?

Lighter pushing of color this time.

As per CD's comment, her skin tones were warm to start with, with fake tan (spray type), so was warm to start with.

Please C&C on this one...

[Kyle]

Im liking that, nice work

[drifter]

Oz . I hope you don't mind .I just did a quick levels and USM on your pic . I'll remove it if you like .

Looks like your white balance is off . I find a quick way to see if your monitor or your colours are close is to do a quick auto levels on a shot first.Not the be all and end all but a quick check before a thorough PP.

[Oz_Beachside]

Oz . I hope you don't mind .I just did a quick levels and USM on your pic . I'll remove it if you like .

Looks like your white balance is off . I find a quick way to see if your monitor or your colours are close is to do a quick auto levels on a shot first.Not the be all and end all but a quick check before a thorough PP.

thanks drifter,
no prob, since you are contributing to me learning, happy for you to leave it there.

I just tried auto levels, and get great results, thanks for the tip!!!

[Oz_Beachside]

what is USM? Unsharp mask?

[Dargan]

Reshoot in Raw and look to something like Dx0 as an initial process. Good subject and pose for fashion photography but have to agree with colour cast problem noted above.

[drifter]

Yup . On a fresh JPEG try something like this before resizing

200 -Amount
0.3 -radius
0 -Threshhold

You can go a bit harder on a converted raw image .The JPEG has some level of sharpening already applied in camera .

[Aussie Dave]

what is USM? Unsharp mask?

Oz
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