a little colour in your cheeks
Doing colour correction on skintones can be problematic. Sure, you can adjust them until they look good on your monitor but they don’t print well. The problem is that your monitor may not be calibrated properly, you may be dealing with colour casts on the original photos, or you may simply lack target colours to adjust to.
You need to have a target skintone in order to achieve predictable results when the images print.
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SKINTONES BY THE NUMBERS
You can only go so far adjusting skin tones visually, your screen, ambient light and your skills all play a role in the result. BUT, if you adjust your skintones by the numbers… ie to targetted values, you will have more control and more predictable results.
USING THE CHART
The chart below gives tonal targets for skin MID-TONES. Put your eye dropper over an area in your image, like the cheek, that is neither in shadow nor in bright light and note the RGB or CMYK values. Compare those colour values with the chart below and using it as a guide only, correct your colours, one channel at a time, using Photoshop’s Curves (Menu: Image/Adjustments/Curves).
BUT, the question remains, “Should you adjust in RGB or CMYK mode?”
STEP 1: Start in RGB mode
RGB mode has more colour range than CMYK, so your adjustments can be more refined. Do your visual correction in RGB, make the image look pleasing to you on screen, then use the RGB colour targets in the chart below to further refine your adjustments. If you are staying in RGB mode then you are done, otherwise it is time to switch to CMYK.
STEP 2: Switch to CMYK (if going to press)
Make your final tone adjustments in CMYK mode – again, one channel at a time – to your Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black channels.
| Skn Tone | RGB | CMYK | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (mid-tone sample) | R | G | B | C | M | Y | K |
| Pale Caucasian | 226 | 164 | 143 | 10 | 40 | 40 | 0 |
| Caucasian (average) | 214 | 143 | 116 | 15 | 50 | 55 | 0 |
| African (average) | 166 | 99 | 78 | 35 | 70 | 75 | 5 |
| Brown Skin | 194 | 122 | 93 | 25 | 60 | 69 | 0 |
| Asian | 227 | 163 | 114 | 10 | 40 | 60 | 0 |
COLOUR CHART
The colour chart below is an RGB image representing the mid-tone skin values in the table above. Please keep in mind through all of this that interpreting skintones is often subjective, there is a wide range of skintones in the people around us and it would not hurt to start collecting your own samples like the chart below. Use these numbers as a starting point and keep refining your own charts and you will be one step closer to predictable results every time.
click to download:
david
