adjust skin tones?

Seajay

Seajay

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Cathy
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Hi hope you do not mind me asking.This is just a snap taken today with the kids messing around and letting me get some practice with my flash.

Their mum likes this one but I know Charly my granddaughter will hate it if her ear is showing.Is the best way to clone it out or is there a better way.

I did try the clone tool but it looked so false.I also notice the kids all have different skin tones
would it look better in black and white?.
It is only for a family snap book.
Cathy
 
I don't think her ear detracts from the pic, but using the clone tool gives a reasonable result if you sample the area of hair closest to her face. If you use the eyedropper tool to look at the tones in the hair surrounding the ear you can see that they're very similar so there shouldn't be any obvious patches. Or are you concerned that it looks false because you can't see her ear?

Untitled-128.jpg
 
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If you have PS Elements or CS you could use the magic wand tool to make a selection of the middle boy's face then add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and drag the Hue slider some way to the left.
 
Stephen I was using the almost black part of her hair closet to her skin at her ear but when I used the clone tool it looked like I had painted it on and I felt it was so obvious .
This girl hates her ears but she is only 14 and just at the age where nothing looks right :).

I see you did it much better and I will try it again using your method.


Gary he has a very pale face naturally and your idea to warm it is welcome advice thank you.
 
You can do this quite quickly in cs, not sure about what elements can do. If you hold the shift key down whilst clicking with the eyedropper tool on an area of good skin tone, you'll see a control point on the pic. This will have a number which matches a set of rgb values in the info window. If you shift click on an are of skin that you want to adjust you'll get another control point with it's own set of values. It'll look something like this:

info.gif


Your aim is to achieve similar (very ballpark) values in the skin to be adjusted.

I do this by applying a levels adjustment layer and individually adjusting the R G B levels on point 2 to match those of point 1.
Note that while you're adjusting that each number is actually a pair; the 1st is the original, the second is the new value.

info2.gif


Try to match(ish) the new value of point 2 with the original of point 1.
Of course you're changing the whole picture, but you simply mask in/out the face that you need to adjust.
I know this may sound complex, but it takes less than a minute and is quite easy really.
I've over-done the effect in my edit above so you can see.

I'm sure there are other (maybe better) ways to do this, but this describes my approach.

<edit> Oh, don't forget to paint (on the mask) to cover the lips, eyes etc so they stay the same. You can also play with the opacity of the adjustment layer to lessen the effect.
Try not to edit the original layer and you'll always be able to go back to it. <edit>
 
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Stephen thank you I had a go at this last night but I was rubbish at it and will try again today:) but I appreciate the time you have all taken to help and will keep at it.

I may also
try a greyscale copy as the kids and I were just messing around and they had just come in from football and boys faces and feet not quite as pristine as they would have been if I had been really setting them up for a photo.


Think I like it better B/W as it was the easy option .Maybe not perfect but as near as i could get.




Charly Jay Brodie2 by cooriedoon, on Flickr
 
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Here is a quickie using simple PS techniques. I find there are many ways to achieve the same thing in PS, but it really depends on the familiarity the user has with PS that decides the approach.

edit_001.jpg

Skin tones were fixed using a mixture of lasso (feathered by 1px) with hue/saturation.

I did clean up the uneven lighting on the wall behind by duplicating the layer, setting the blend mode to screen (change opacity to suit) and using a zero hardness eraser to hollow out the middle of this new layer (it's like 'anti-vignette').

The carpet (bottom right corner) was colour corrected using a new layer, brushing on a flat colour picked from the carpet on the other side, setting blend mode of this new layer to softlight and erasing the 'spill' of the brush (spill here meaning where the brush has strayed onto the subjects). The opacity was changed to suit colour density.

As always, more can be done... but I hope users can benefit from this simple way of editing images. This was all done without clone/healing/history brushes.


Chris.
 
Chris great job! This looks really good and I will have a go following your advice and thank you for taking the time to help
I have one of the boys I am working on taken the same day and I will try this procedure on it as well and post when complete. As they had been running around with no socks inside and out their feet were a little in need of a clean but I did not think I was going to get any that were good enough for print I just wanted to try out my new flash. I am struggling with the feet I get them too dark or too light but I will stick with it!
 
Seajay, that looks much more even now. Well done!

Ways to perhaps improve on it a little...

1) It looks like you had a go with the layer set to screen (hollowing out the centre of this new layer with a soft eraser) to reduce the vignette (due to a little bit of uneven lighting). I'd suggest further hollowing out the centre of this 'screen' layer, so that the middle is practically gone. You can then increase this layer's opacity to further reduce the vignetting.

2) Use a 1 px feathered lasso to roughly go around a child's face (do it freehand and don't worry about it being sloppy, just make sure you select the whole face). Duplicate this (Ctrl+J or Cmd+J) and then try playing with Hue/Saturation (Ctrl+U or Cmd+U). This is a good way to avoid polluting the main layer when editing. Once you are happy with your changes, zoom in and use a 75% hard edge eraser to get rid of any 'spill'. By spill I mean extra image that isn't the child's face. Because you roughly selected the face, you will have also selected other areas that you didn't want to correct.

This method is a great way to correct elements within an image and avoid the painstaking process of carefully lassoing the face or object you wish to colour correct.

As always, there are other ways to achieve this.. but this is quick, easy and gets results.


Chris.
 
Thank you Mike will have a look and see what I can find

Chris I see what you mean. I opened the image again and I can see right around the chin area where you can see the edit I made
I will try again and see if I can improve it even more. It is the only way to learn.
Thank you
Cathy
 
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