WB>Skin Tone
After watching David Grover's excellent C1 tutorial on CreativeLive I thought I understood the WB>Skin Tone tool, but when I tried it, confusion set in. Specifically:
Why is it in the WB tab in the first place? Would it not be more intuitively located in the Color Editor>Skin Tone tab?
When a skin tone preset is applied, it applies to the entire image, necessitating using a mask, making its placement in the WB tool even more confusing, doesn't it?
Hopefully more expert users than me can explain.
Thanks,
-Alan D
Why is it in the WB tab in the first place? Would it not be more intuitively located in the Color Editor>Skin Tone tab?
When a skin tone preset is applied, it applies to the entire image, necessitating using a mask, making its placement in the WB tool even more confusing, doesn't it?
Hopefully more expert users than me can explain.
Thanks,
-Alan D
0
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Confusingly enough, I suppose, there are two different skin tone controls.
(1) In with the white balance tool there is a skin tone tool. My understanding of that one is that you can use it to match skin tones between one image and another. So if I have photographed a person in two different lighting conditions I can pick a skin tone from one and apply it to the other. This is an alternative to adjusting the colour of the image by picking a neutral colour from say a grey card, or by playing with the Kelvin and Tint sliders. The tool will adjust Kelvin and Tint to make the chosen colour look right. (Incidentally, you are not limited to skin tones with this tool. If you wanted to match say the colour of some product packaging or a garment you could use it for that too.) You might well want to apply the change in lighting to the whole image.
There is some help here.
(2) The other skin tone control is in with the colour editor. You can use it, for example, to smooth out a subject's skin tones to get a more even colour. Help on that can be found here as well as in David Grover's excellent webinars. You might be OK using this on the whole image as long as it contains no other tones similar to the skin tone in question. Otherwise you would need to use it as a local adjustment and apply it to say just the face area of a portrait.
Ian0 -
Thank you, Ian.
The C1 Help site is also confusing: "Choose the appropriate option in the Skin tone in the drop down menu." This does nothing unless one also selects the picker and clicks in the image, which applies the selected skin tone globally. To restrict the selected skin tone to skin one must apparently use a Local Adjustment mask.
It seems more intuitive to me to move this function to the Color Editor skin tone tool, and then only appear in the Local Adjustments tab. Am I missing something?
-Alan D0 -
Alan
Yes I think you are missing something. There are two completely separate Skin Tone tools, and it is unfortunate that they don't have different names. Essentially in the White Balance tool we have two ways of setting Kelvin and Tint for an image as a whole.
* grey, and
* skin tone
With grey I adjust the white balance of my image by clicking the picker on something in the image that is meant to be neutral grey.
With skin tone I adjust the white balance of my mage by clicking the picker on something in my image that is meant to be a particular colour (often skin, but it could be anything such as a blue coat). Of course to do that I have to choose which colour I am aiming to match. I can choose one of the built-in options (such as Beige - Medium) or I can choose one of my own if I have set up a preset from another image that I know is correctly lit and adjusted.
As with setting a grey point, I can in fact do that for the whole image, or I can do it as a local adjustment, to just change the white balance (using skin tone instead of grey) for just a face. (I've never tried that before but I tried it just now and it worked well.)
Then the other completely separate tool is the skin tone option in the colour editor tool. This is used for controlling the uniformity of a colour - often skin colour, but again it can be used for other things like adjusting the uniformity of the blue of the sky.
Hope that helps.
Ian0 -
Alan
Thanks for your excellent clarification on this topic and the two different tools. That cleared the sky for me as well!0 -
Ian, I still do not see logically why a skin tone tool should be a global adjustment included under a broader White Balance tool. Of course one can use it for other purposes, but it is clearly meant for skin tone - the drop down presets are all skin tones, are they not? To each his own, but I would rarely if ever apply a "skin tone" to an entire image.
Anyway, since discovering the tool, I do find it useful to save certain skin tones for re-use. I suppose it may be possible to add the WB>skin tone tool to a customized Color Editor, where I think it belongs. Will try that approach.
Thanks for your input,
-Alan D0 -
[quote="Focuspuller" wrote:
Ian, I still do not see logically why a skin tone tool should be a global adjustment included under a broader White Balance tool. Of course one can use it for other purposes, but it is clearly meant for skin tone - the drop down presets are all skin tones, are they not? To each his own, but I would rarely if ever apply a "skin tone" to an entire image.
I believe it's in the right place: it changes the white balance of the image, thus affecting all colors and not just the skin tone. It's exactly the same as the 'white' picker, only its target color is not a neutral grey but a skin tone. The picker tells the program to adjust the white balance of the entire image so that the clicked point approaches the reference color.
In contrast, the picker in the skin tone mode of the color editor reads the color from the clicked point but it doesn't do anything else by itself. It just defines a range of colors you can then change. So, that tool only affects the colors in the selected range and not the entire image. And it's not aiming to set it to a reference color; you can change it to almost anything you want.
HTH,
Peter.0 -
Peter,
Maybe I am in the minority, but I just don't see the use of applying a skin tone globally as a white balance, but maybe its more common than I would expect, which is fine. Thanks for your input,
-Alan D0 -
[quote="Focuspuller" wrote:
Peter,
Maybe I am in the minority, but I just don't see the use of applying a skin tone globally as a white balance, but maybe its more common than I would expect, which is fine. Thanks for your input,
-Alan D
Alan,
I seem to remember reading or seeing something that outlined the rationale for the skin tone function.
This is what seems to have stuck in my head.
Firstly it was aimed originally at (studio) portrait work as a way to get a consistent look across a series of selected shots.
Balancing the colours to the whole frame, where common skin tones might appear other than as skin, makes for a more colour balanced result. One can think of it as a sort of toning for portrait or some fashion styles and a starting point for further artistic toning for the final result.
Secondly, it has a big use for smoothing similar colours in a relatively narrow band of colour and so it appearance and effect on the rest of an image that is not "skin tone" would in most cases be very limited anyway.
However, if used to smooth a different colour - a sky for example - the effect might be broader and in that case the wider adjustment might be quite welcomed as it would help also to balance the sky reflected in water for example.
With different approaches there seems to be something for everyone across most image types - unless one wishes to head into full graphics colour manipulation in which case I suppose there is always PS.
Grant0 -
Hi Grant,
If the goal is to apply saved adjustments over a series of variants similar in subject, lighting, and look, there is a way to copy and apply, or save as a style. To save a global WB>Skin Tone to apply in other variants in different lighting, subject, set, etc., to me is a highly unlikely scenario, but some may find that useful.
-Alan D0 -
[quote="Focuspuller" wrote:
Hi Grant,
If the goal is to apply saved adjustments over a series of variants similar in subject, lighting, and look, there is a way to copy and apply, or save as a style. To save a global WB>Skin Tone to apply in other variants in different lighting, subject, set, etc., to me is a highly unlikely scenario, but some may find that useful.
-Alan D
One application for that would be commercial photos including branded packaging. The manufacturer may have a colour that is strongly associated with their brand, such as the purple colour used for Cadbury's milk chocolate in the UK (and perhaps elsewhere?) You could use the WB>Skin tone tool to make sure the white balance of a particular shot gave the correct colour of the packaging every time.
And you may find it an unlikely scenario. I don't actually use this feature myself (other than trying it out from curiosity). But I can readily see that for some kinds of work it would be really useful.
Ian0
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