Ben Rubinstein
pro member
In a previous thread here, Ben shared the novel idea of using a profile for the 5D from a Nikon D700 to optimize skin tones. The related posts including iPortrait Professional provide compelling alternate methods of getting pleasing skin tones in portraits or wedding pictures. So they were moved here to start a new thread devoted to software approaches to skin beauty.
With software one can remove contaminating hue referencing a neutral gray and only then apply the desired adjustment for the beautiful skin tone applied to the skin only. Other parts of the picture unaltered and the whites are perfect. Asher
I'm with Jack here as a wedding photographer, asthetic taste over accuracy every time! What is important for me is that all the other tones corresspond with the overall chosen WB. For example in ACR I could never get the faces to go right. Forget accurate which wasn't pleasing in most cases, the facial tones didn't fall into place nicely when the asthetically correct WB was chosen. I have mostly managed to fix that by mapping the Nikon D700's colour onto my 5D files using the DNG Profile Editor. It's very subtle but the saturations and depth of the facial colours is now (more) correct relative to the chosen white balance. I'm hoping that using the Gretag chart will give me this same help when shooting in complicated lighting. You can get the white balance correct but it won't help unless the software knows what to do with all the other tones relative to the WB. I find fluorescent lighting to be the worst by far to get pleasing skin tones for as everything looks dead under it! Mix it with flash and it's a nightmare to get right. You can have a perfect WB by using a Whibal but it still doesn't look 'right'.
With software one can remove contaminating hue referencing a neutral gray and only then apply the desired adjustment for the beautiful skin tone applied to the skin only. Other parts of the picture unaltered and the whites are perfect. Asher
I'm with Jack here as a wedding photographer, asthetic taste over accuracy every time! What is important for me is that all the other tones corresspond with the overall chosen WB. For example in ACR I could never get the faces to go right. Forget accurate which wasn't pleasing in most cases, the facial tones didn't fall into place nicely when the asthetically correct WB was chosen. I have mostly managed to fix that by mapping the Nikon D700's colour onto my 5D files using the DNG Profile Editor. It's very subtle but the saturations and depth of the facial colours is now (more) correct relative to the chosen white balance. I'm hoping that using the Gretag chart will give me this same help when shooting in complicated lighting. You can get the white balance correct but it won't help unless the software knows what to do with all the other tones relative to the WB. I find fluorescent lighting to be the worst by far to get pleasing skin tones for as everything looks dead under it! Mix it with flash and it's a nightmare to get right. You can have a perfect WB by using a Whibal but it still doesn't look 'right'.
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