Ugly skin colors.

[tom_mann1]

<p>:-)</p><div></div>

[Tim_Lookingbill]

<p>Nice duotone, Herma. Really smooth, silky quality to the tonal transitions.</p>

<p>You may have a calibration issue that's throwing off your perception of skin tone which happens to be the canary in the coal mine for calibration issues. You mentioned earlier not hardware calibrating your editing work station display.</p>

<p>Also as you and others indicated there seems to be something about your 3200K warm color cast lighting mixed with other types of lighting in that scene that kept throwing off my sense of correct looking skin tone to where I had to compare my final against a known standard skin color target. The boy on the left is a bit jaundice while the boy on the right is kind of on the pink side. I leaned toward a warmer color cast to help blend the two together. I look at it now and it seems a bit too red. Oh well.</p>

[wogears]

<p>Not gonna edit this--original is fine within the limits of the lighting used. I want to suggest one thing to everyone here. When evaluating skin tone, even with a calibrated high-end monitor, it can be useful to look at the numbers. Yes, I know this is outated, prepress almost Dan Margulis-ish stuff, but I still find it helpful. It's especially helpful if other hues in the image are throwing off your color perception. In this case, the numbers on the original post are C=0 M=30 Y=31 K=0. That's nice skin tone. On 'Fix 2' I get 0,25,32,16. (I am using a Windows freeware called 'ColorMania'--on Mac, I would use the Apple Digital Color Meter.) This last value isn't too bad, but the black is high enough to indicate a fair amount of desaturation.</p>

[herma]

<p>Very nice feedback Tim and Les. Tom, awesom fire. Now, can you reflect some of that light onto the back of their hair? That would have surely messed up the lightmeter, I assume.</p>

<p>Santa, I want lightboxes....</p>

[Tim_Lookingbill]

<p>Les, I use CMYK as a guide as well. </p>

<p>But I think this image is too small to use it reliably. Something happens to the perception of saturation levels at least with my eyes when there's very few pixels to render enough tonal transitions the smaller the image especially in a compressed jpeg. In this case I think it becomes necessary to rely on the overall look viewed next to images of naturally correct looking skin tone shot under neutral looking full spectrum lighting.</p>

[jimi_james]

<p>My version</p><div></div>

[herma]

<p>That's nice Jimi. I didn't mean for my dog to be in the picture all cut off though. Those colors are very much like the real deal. Thanks everybody....</p>

<p>Now if I just get CS5 installed properly...</p>