Improve Skin Tone Quickly

This time on our editing tip here on LensVid in cooperation with PSkiss we take a look at improving skin tones in a quick and fairly easy way.

This video looks at how you can correct (or maybe we should say improve) the skin tone of this lovely girl in the photo (who has a white skin tone). As Tal Ninio (the  founder and CEO of PSkiss) explains in the video – there is a sort of color formula that you can use to do that. You start by pressing F8 to get the info panel. Choose the eyedropper and select a point where the skin tone is clear (not to bright and not too dark). Now you need to change the mode of the point you selected to CMYK (always remember to do this during this process).

Look at the colors the you have – here is the formula (if you don’t know your CMYK – check it out here and in this more in-depth video):

  • Cyan = 1/2 to 1/3 of magenta.
  • Yellow = equal or a bit higher than magenta.

If you don’t get this in your image you need to fix this by adding a curve adjustment layer and change it just like Ninio shows in the video (you may need to play with it more than once to get to the correct formula values in your images). If you want the rest of the image to look like it was before you made this changes – pick the brush tool and use black on the background area.

If you took your image in RAW you can also do this in another way which can actually be very interesting – using PSkiss’ Cross Camera Color Profiles you can (in camera RAW) choose a different color profile which is very similar to that of another camera (Leica for example) and the result might be much better – you can play with different profiles and see which one looks better for each specific image.

You can check out more LensVid exclusive articles and reviews on the following link. You can find all of the videos from our LensVid editing tips here.

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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