Skin Tones/ Tan How to??

[rickp1]

I'm using LR3 and CS5 as my PPing software.
What I've noticed is that using the saturation or vibrance sliders the skin tones tend to get a bit of an orange tint.
What I'm looking to do is ad a bit of a tan or color to certain images with skin in them. Does anyone have a good procedure or color formula to achieve this? I'm not looking for anything crazy just give people a bit of natural tan color.
BTW, I'm shooting RAW.

Thanks
R.

[natek313]

As with most things in PS, there are a 1,000 different ways to do one task.

But, perhaps the simplest way to add a tan would be to use a fill layer with a brown/tan color. Obviously, you'll want to set the blending mode to something other than "Normal." Then, just use a layer mask to hide the fill layer in areas that you don't want it to show. You'll want to do this after you color correct the natural skin tone, if you need to.

This isn't how I adjust my skin tones if I feel I need to. I usually do it in the same process as my skin smoothing.

EDIT: You can also use the Curves tool. You can select the skin area and use curves to darken the skin a bit along with changing blending modes and all that good stuff.

[RLucas]

I have been using the trial of LR3 for about a month now, and I have run in to the same problem several times. The last few portraits I have done, ended up too cool, with a magenta cast in the skin tones, but when i adjust the wb, and up the vibrance, everything goes too orange. What I have figured out with mine is if I adjust the WB to the point where it is getting warm, and adjust the red/green slider to a neutral point, then after you have adjusted exposure, clarity, and vibrance to where you are happy, you can go in and adjust the colors. I like the "on image" adjustment the best. In the color adjustment dialogue box, there is a little button you can click on, which is located in the uper left corner. You can drag it to any point of the image you want to adjust, left click, and wheel the saturation, luminence, and hue up and down. I seem to be having some success with it. Check out the "Emily" set on my stream, and you will see the difference it made on the duplicate images.

Hope this helps!
Luke

[teaking]

On the subject of skin tone correction, there are any many ways to do it the most precise way I have saw is to mask the area which is not always needed it really depends what the adjustments do to you image. Adding a few sample points to well lit portion of skin will really help and then if you open curve and select one of the sample points to add to each colour channel. You can then adjust each colour curve to tone the skin. As a rule of thumb for skin Red is greater than Blue and Blue is greater than Green with Red being the highest value. The difference between Red and Blue is usualy more than the difference between Blue and Green. Playing with these values will let you add a tan colour.

As far as saturation I have found that using the channel mixer and selecting each colour channel for example Red: and changing Red to 150 percent and changing Blue and Green to -125. And repeat for the rest Blue 150 Red and Green -125 etc will give better saturation boost and less crazy colours.

Maybe a mixture of both or even something completely different lol

[rickp1]

Thanks guys I appreciate the info. I'll give this a try and see what comes up.

R.