Simone Maranzana personal portfolio

In each photo where there are people the skin tone is the most important color, fixing or adjusting it to the best is a delicate exercise because you risk to ruin the image itself.
Firstly, let’s open our image of example and regulate the white and the black as shown in the first tutorial (Please note: do not increase the contrast).

Now we must place a new control point to acquire information on the skin color.
Contrarily to white or black point, we need more pixels to determine the color of the skin; then let’s set eye dropper tool on 5×5 average and place our control point in an area of the face of our subject as explained in the picture.

Let’s go into the info palette and change the color space of the new point positioned to view a cmyk value.

What I’m going to show you now is the procedure I follow when I need to adjust a photo; it does not want to be the “absolute way”, but a useful guide (I hope) to start.
Let’s open the smart filter curves created to balance the white and black point.
Let’s move with the cursor on the control point created and, pressing shift+command (on Mac) or shift+ctrl (on PC), we click to the centre of this.

By doing this, we have added a point for each channel of our filter curves.
I will try to summarize in the following scheme what I usually try to obtain, when adjusting the skin tone (Caucasian):

• Cyan: about 1/3 or 1/4 more than the average between Magenta and Yellow
• Yellow: 10% more than Magenta

To increase the value of the yellow just intervene in the channel of its opposite colour, that is the blue, the same also for the Magenta and Cyan.
Below, a simple scheme to remember the colors opposed.

• Cyan: opposite color > Red
• Magenta: opposite color > Green
• Yellow: opposite color > Blue

Once balanced the values of cmy you may need retest the values of the white and the black previously modified to bring them back to the values indicated in the first tutorial.

Now you can apply a slight increase in the contrast.