Post Processing African American

[Lizabeta]

I have two issues... one is skin shine... which I'm working on but feel like maybe there is no good solution. There are some good articles out there for pale skin, but I think black skin has such a wide variety of tone that removing shine seems to be more difficult.

Much more importantly to me right now is an issue that I did not notice when taking photos at a wedding. The shape of the brides face, and the direction of the light... created a shadow under her cheeks that looks like she has a five o'clock shadow.

Seriously, can you even guess how I feel about this? I cannot give these photos to her with her looking like this. How I did not notice this earlier I cannot fathom.



Can anyone give me any post processing advice on this? (outside of the 'pay more attention next time' variety?)

[deadgirlreading]

I know that Coffeeshop has a free action for African American skin. That might help some. I wish I could offer more help.

[edbayani]

try making a blank layer on top and with the eye dropper tool, select the nearest skin tone that you want to brush o top of the shine with 10% opacity till the shine is covered. fine tune with sponge tool to saturate or desaturate some areas using 10% opacity. the go to noise, add noise and add a very little amount so it wont be so smooth compared to the area below. merge. the shadow below the skin is so dark but use quickmask and brush the dark areas with a soft brush. exit and apply levels just enough to lighten it a bit to separate the chin and the neck.

[Photologyst]

In Photoshop layers used healing brush and clone stamp to tone down skin shine on forehead.

Used Clone tool @ varying opacities 80% 50% 30% to remove shadows on bride and bride’s maid. Used Heal tool along with Clone tool as needed.

Employed Topaz Denoise, then ran through Portraiture to even skin tones.

It will take a bit of time to correct this, but I think on the RAW original instead of a 140K copy it could work out well.

You should probably sharpen the eyes and mouths at the end of the process via Lab Mode method.

[teaking]

From my visits around the web I have saw the method mentioned by Ed used my retouchers, they select an average skin tone colour from the picture, and select the skin area and on a blank layer fill the layer with that colour and adjust the opacity of the layer. It works as shown by Ed

Have you also looked at dodge and burning to even out the skin tones, you can use curves layers, or 50% gray softlight layer, or just a blank softlight layer. If you put a greyscale layer above your stack and clip a curves adjustment layer to it you can alter and see the contrast easier between tones and even it out a bit better.