Color Manipulation for Portraits: Lifestyle
David Grover
Lesson Info
9. Color Manipulation for Portraits: Lifestyle
Lessons
Class Introduction
03:10 2Advanced Color Selections
26:44 3Color Correcting: Product Photography
06:34 4Color Correcting: Architecture Photography
06:09 5Color Correcting: Travel Photography
07:07 6Color Balance Tool and How to Save Styles
14:13 7Dive into the Color Editor's Skin Tone Tab
14:04 8Color Manipulation for Portraits: Headshots
07:36Lesson Info
Color Manipulation for Portraits: Lifestyle
So with Lifestyle, we can actually do things a little bit differently because, which example shall we use? Let's grab this example. Because sometimes, if you don't have those precise facial features to draw around, like we saw before, it's easy making a mask here, but it's less easy making a mask here for example, because we've got hair in front of the face and so on. But in this case, let's just make sure we reset, back to zero, everything on zero. But if we look at our model's face here for example, you can see the color tone varies across the bridge of her nose, like so. If we go down, you can see there's a little patch, sort of around here, where the skin tone varies and kind of on her shoulder, as well. So what's probably easier and faster to do in this respect, is to make ourselves a skin brush, where we can just kind of happily brush the correction in, without getting too involved in making super precise masks, we're gonna be much much looser. So the process is similar, but a li...
ttle bit different. So the first thing we're gonna do is, we're gonna make a layer again, called Skin Fix, and we're gonna go to our color editor and we're gonna pick our nice skin tone again, like so. Actually, before we do that, before we do anything, we're gonna invert this mask. And you might say, why on Earth am I gonna do that? But when we invert the mask, that's now gonna cover the whole image, because I want to be able to preview what's going on. So invert mask, as we had no mask, and we inverted it, it's now over the entire image as such. So now what I'm gonna do, is go to my color editor, the skin tone tab, do as before, let's grab our nice skin tone. Again, I'm going to expand this out. And then we're gonna look at the bridge of her nose, and zoom in a bit, and then we're gonna grab hue, like so. Saturation and a bit of lightness. So, now we can see, we've fixed the color. But of course, it's gonna be affecting her lips and a few other bits and so on. So now, we only want to selectively use this adjustment. So what we do is, we invert this back, so it's back to normal. Take a brush, my draw mask brush, make it nice and big, and nice and soft, like so, and what we're gonna do is, we're gonna take this adjustment down: the flow. And what flow does on your brush, means that when you move the brush back and forth, like so, the lower the flow, the more passage you get before you get to full opacity. So if you imagine my flow goes down to a very low amount, it's gonna take me lots and lots of brushes back and forth before I build up to my full opacity. So essentially, it gives you a very slow and controlled way, to build up a mask from zero, to its full opacity. So when you brush, it's not bam, all in at the same time. It allows you to brush back and forth, and that mask will gradually build up, until you wanna stop, and you get that desired result. So I'm gonna put my flow down relatively low, and then as I said, nice big brush. And now we can look at our Lifestyle subject, and then we can just brush away like so. And then gradually, that will just do our skin tone correction. If we turn that on and off, you can see the bridge of her nose change, like so. If I've gone too far, I can just press erase and take a bit away. Now we can go down here, B for brush, and then we can just paint in the correction, here for example. And a little bit on the shoulder, like so. It blends in really nicely. And maybe a touch over there. But, by doing it this way, it means that you've essentially built yourself a skin correction brush. So, you've picked the nice skin color and then we can brush that happily over wherever we want it. If we just reset this local adjustment, you can see before, you can just see the color on her nose change, like so. If we go down to chest, like so, and option click, and you can just see the color change a little bit on her chest. But that's, the way we did it before, is we did the mask, and then we did the correction. This way, we kind of visualized the correction, and then we loosely paint in the mask where we want it. So it's a really nice way of working with Lifestyle. Certainly, with kind of this sort of subject, you'll find that certainly people's hands, if they've been outside, or if they've been exercising or if they're cold, skin tone on the hands is, always looks different. So again, in this case, if we wanted to match everything up, we can make a new layer, called Skin Fix, invert it, like so, so that we've got the whole mask on the image. Go to the color editor, skin tone tab, look on our subject and think, where is the good skin tone? So I'm gonna go around here. We're gonna paint this on with a mask so I don't feel bad about spreading this out. And then, we'll carefully look at our subject, drag hue all the way to the right. Saturation and lightness, like so. Now, because that's affecting her lips and some of the grass and so on, we're gonna invert this back, so it's not anywhere, and now we're gonna take our nice big brush, probably not that big, we low flow, and then we can just paint this skin tone correction on, wherever we want to, as such. So, simple, simple as that. And it gives you a way to work quite fast, as well. Because with Lifestyle, you're probably dealing with a few more images. So let's just grab, like with a head shot, you might deliver two or three good head shots of a subject. With Lifestyle, you're probably gonna have to deliver a whole bunch of stuff. So you don't want to be doing really critcal masking on 15, 20 images. So by doing it this way, it means that you're having to spend less time. So I can just do a quick pass of the brush over the bridge of her nose. Then I wanna see, if I go on the lips, then that messes that up. So we're just gonna do a little bit down here, and final check, and nice even skin tone, but by drawing the mask loose. If you see the mask now, you can see how it looks, like so. And because we were using that nice low flow, then it means we can build it up in the areas that need more, we can see. As I brush more, you see the mask gets deeper. If I just do a single brush, it's quite faint. So this gives you a varying control over applying that fix as well. It's a really wonderful way to work for all kinds of adjustments. So we can do that for dodging and burning, for sharpening noise reduction, and again, those are subjects that we'll cover in the Advanced Photo Editing Class, as well. But for skin tone, if you can just master those little things that we spoke about, then you can do a great deal.
Class Materials
Ratings and Reviews
Dan
Can you get all this stuff online? Probably, but it's great to have it all in one place and it's pretty comprehensive. David doesnt waffle it's pretty much pure content so it gets a thumbs up from me.
Jakob Lehner
I use CP1 for about two years now being pretty happy with it and my color editing skills. So I thought, nahhh not for me I know it all... After some time I bought it on sale and I couldn't be more wrong. I learned much more in the first 40mins than in the last 2 years from YouTube tutorials. This one is really great, highly recommend it!
user-940746
David's knowledge of the color correction process in CaptureOne is amazing! This class has not only adde to my knowledge of color correction, it has shown me how to do it with a quicker and easier process.