Advice on photograph Asian skin tone

Hello. I'm starting to shoot portraits on 645 medium format (Bronica ETRSi) now since I've been shooting street and lifestyle for a while. My first two rolls were Portra 400. The first roll I shot with natural light and the second one with flash. I'm Asian and my model is Asian too, she have typical Asian skin tone. And the photos came out super yellowish, some have green tint in it, they also seems overexposed, but I was very careful with the meter, my digital test shots were well lit. It's so hard for my to adjust in post. I searched for some articles on Goolge but nothing useful really. Can someone here help me on this topic? Because I will mostly shoot my friends and Asian customers. I thought Fuji Pro 400H maybe works better than Portra for Asian skin tone. I ordered some roll of Fuji but in the meantime waiting for the shipping, I hope can learn something in here, what background color I should use, camera setting, light setup, meter,...

Hi, let me first say that I've spent a large part of my adult work life involved in mainly technical aspects of high-volume portrait work. Prior to the digital revolution the last film we used was Portra 160 which made, if I may say so, beautiful prints when optically printed onto an appropriate professional paper. I would presume that Portra 400 behaves similarly to the 160 version, but I don't know this for sure. The Portra 160, shot under studio conditions, meaning electronic flash, was very forgiving with respect to exposure - you could typically be from a stop underexposed to 3 or 4 stops over, and the optical prints could be hand-balanced to be virtually identical.

 

What I'm leading up to is that I think the scanning is your main problem. At least when using flash. When using "natural" light different colors of light can be having an effect, so may confuse the issue. For example, if someone is posing above green grass you would expect that shadow areas under the chin will likely be "filled in" with some greenish light reflected from the grass. Now, this is probably not objectionable in a portrait because the viewer can see what's going on - it looks natural. But if you are trying to correct out that green it could be pretty difficult.

 

If you don't have a lot of experience with this it might be worth sending a roll off to a pro type of lab, one that specializes in portrait and wedding work, just so you'll have a reference of what can be done. Or, it might be worth posting a small example here. Or, if you want to post some pixel values I'll be glad to make an opinion on what to do, although you may already have a good idea. If you post pixel data, try giving some rgb values for skin highlights, midtones, and moderate shadows, as well as the color space (such as sRGB).

I assume you scanned the negatives and see the color distortion in the scans. This could be nothing more than white balance. Place a neutral white balance target in one of the frames, and then adjust in post.

 

As Ansel Adams said when comparing a photograph to a symphony - "The negative is the score; the print is the performance." There is nothing wrong with compensating for white balance in the print/scanning phase. It is normal to do so.

Work flow . . . We need to know something about your work flow. We can't just assume and guess. Portra400 is a great, neutral film that shouldn't give you problems. Printing and scanning those negatives on the other hand, like any negatives, can be more troublesome.

 

I have shot far more than a handful of Asian weddings and I never really found them to be an issue. The skin tone CAN come out over exposed or the scanning process can over expose it. This largely depends on the amount of skin filling the frame. A tight shot of a face for example may over expose. Flash can do this as well.

 

If you can't fix this images in post, you should get a few prints made at a good lab and see what's happening.