Google has announced that it is taking additional steps to improve the representation of various skin tones across its products and has implemented a new scale that better shows the spectrum of real-world skin color.
Adobe has teamed up with prominent photographers who are experienced in photographing subjects with darker skin tones to release a set of free presets that aim to deliver more naturally calibrated photos of all skin complexions.
I used to think that skin tone was irrelevant to lighting setups. When I photograph people with a flash, I don’t have go-to numbers for the position of my light (distance, height, and angle). My workflow is placing my light somewhere I think it’ll work and fine-tuning from there.
Thanks to everyone who read my previous article on my process as a TV show set photographer, and all of you who got in touch with questions and comments. People had a range of questions, especially about how I use a waveform monitor, so I'll make this a fairly wide-ranging post to try and answer everything.
Ryan Breitkreutz over at Signature Edits has created a useful tutorial that dives into one of the most critical aspects of portrait photography: skin tones. In this 30-minute video, he shares some his personal tips and techniques for capturing natural-looking skin tones, first in-camera, and then in Lightroom.
If you shoot a portrait and your subject is blushing or has red patches on their skin for whatever reason, removing the coloration is quick and easy in Photoshop. This 1-minute Photoshop tutorial by PiXimperfect shows how it's done.
After years of shooting portraits with Canon cameras, photographer Sean Tucker recently switched over to Sony gear. After many people warned him that his portraits would suffer from Sony's "terrible" skin tones, Tucker decided to put the cameras to the test himself in the 20-minute video above.
A lot of the time when we're shooting with flash photography in a big white studio, our portrait images can appear a little stark or cold. This quick fix in Photoshop takes less than two minutes to do but can add a lot of warmth and life back to our models skin.
One of the issues talented photographer and retoucher Michael Woloszynowicz often runs into when he's taking portraits is mismatched skin tones. Using a light modifier of some sort he'll get the tone he wants in the face, but the tones or colors in another part of the subject's skin simply don't match.
You could correct for this using curves, selective color or hue/saturation, but Woloszynowicz has a better way: using solid fill layers and tonal averaging, he's able to "take the guesswork" out of it and perfectly match tones every time.
When it comes to nailing the white-balance in a photo, it's rarely an easy task, especially with portraits. It becomes even more arduous when you're trying to stylize the image a certain way, since you might not want the same tones and color balance in your skin tones as you do in the rest of your image.
This tutorial by the folks at Phlearn shows you how to get past those challenges and achieve the results you want in every part of your photo without having to sacrifice elsewhere.
Any sort of portrait photographer is intimately familiar with the huge variety of skin tones represented by us homo sapiens, but until now nobody had thought to document them all. That's the mammoth task that Brazilian artist and photographer Angelica Dass has taken upon herself with her portrait project Humanae.