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Adjusting Skin Tones

getting good at photo shop. For me, at least when it comes to adjustments is getting comfortable with the most powerful adjustment. The most powerful adjustment is curves by far, but so many people are not comfortable with it because they never have good instruction in it. And they never have time to practice that they don't get very good at. Well, if you want to see the kind of change you can make once you actually practice enough that you're comfortable, let me show you what I did to this particular picture, which is of my wife. Happy ever Face down on the pavement, I do a series of photographs of my wife doing yoga around the world. If you want to see that Siri's It's called The World is my yoga mat in its on instagram. He'd find pictures like this, but I'm gonna turn off a series of adjustments to show what the original picture looked like after I was done in camera raw. Then I wanted it to be quite different, so I ended up adjusting it primarily using curbs, and this is what I was...

able to end up with. Let's just take a look at what's in there. I'm gonna turn off a bunch of adjustment layers. You'll find that every single adjustment layer is a curves adjustment layer. I'm gonna show you this mask is an overlay. I don't think we've done that yet. But if you ever have an adjustment layer that's active and it has a mask with some paint in it on your keyboard right above the returner, enter key will be the backslash key, and if you press it, you'll get a colored overlay. Anything is covered in red is what's not being affected by that adjustment. So in this case, this adjustment effects the background. Not my wife, Karen. I'm gonna turn on its eyeball and let's see what it does to the image, all right, looks to me like it's adding contrast most of the time. Contrast is two dots, one for a bright part, one for a dark part. Make them further apart. Let's look at this curve and see if that happens to be the case. It is exactly two dots. If I were to hover my mouse over the dark portion of this picture, you would see a circle and curves, and it is exactly on top of a dot that was there too dark in this picture that dot was moved down to darken. Then I move my mouse under the bright portion of the picture, and it's very close to a dot that's already in their that Dot's been moved up the slightest bit to Brighton to make a bigger difference between the brightness of those two areas. The next curve up has the same mask, but that one, if I turn it on, makes the colors between those two areas look more different. Doesn't the lighter areas look more bluish when I'm done? Well, that is most likely two dots, one for the bright area, one for the dark and on the blue curve. I betcha. I move part of it up to make it more blue to see that more blue. This one hasn't moved, so it didn't change the amount of blue in the dark areas, and I might have tweaked green or red. But I think it's primarily in the blue. Go to the next one up, turn on its little overlay with backslash key. Anything covered with red will not be affected. So this is affecting my wife skin. If I turn on the adjustment layer, do you see my wife skin changed in color? That's because they didn't like the way it was looking in. Often times. What I do is I find another picture of a person, and I have hundreds of pictures of my wife doing yoga. So I just open up a bunch of references and I can write down the RGB numbers for the skin I like and shift her skin to that the next one up effects on Lee her feet. If I turn it on and off, it's making her feet more colorful. It's making them closer and color to the color of her skin again. Write down the numbers of the skin tone and change the area. Want tohave match it. The next one up is affecting just her head. If I turn on its eyeball, do you see? It's adding contrast. That is two dots on a curve, one for the bright area, one for the dark and the bright one was moved up. You can see it right there, just two dots. Then we have this one, which is working on Lee on the dark pants when it comes to black objects, you can cheat, and I changed the color of my wife's black pants. How the heck did I do it? Well, all I did was hero at a curves adjustment layer to show you, you just click on the color that you're thinking of. Do you want to add more blue? For instance? Move your mouse onto the brighter area of a black object and just pull up, and if you pull up, you should end up changing the amount. But in this case, I actually have. This has gotta down pointing arrow. It doesn't need there, and we'll be able to change the color of a black object. You just need to leave the the lower left dot alone, click on the main brightness of the image and move it up. If I came over here and did the same with let's Say Red, then we're gonna end up with instead of blue pants kind of purple ones. But we can do that with black objects, but in the end, it's getting comfortable with two main adjustments. They are curves and hue and saturation, and I hope that I've started you down that path today

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