—– Original Message —–
From: "frankg"
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.apps.photoshop
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2005 9:44 AM
Subject: Re: Skin tone help – plugin?
Not sure I get the hang of it – in the simplest terms, to get a satisfactory skin tone, do you click on one of the skin pins and drag it onto the image and when you’re happy with what it looks like -ok?
the picture tone changes as you drag the pin about.
each pin is a different rgb value.
so it’s just a matter of try any/all the pins on all the areas of the image?
I almost always use the first pin, and drag it onto an area with a good even skin tone. The operation takes about five seconds. Probably the easiest way to explain is with the video, which you may have already seen:
http://www.curvemeister.com/tutorials/Video/Using_Pinning_fo r_Skin_Tones.avi ..
The idea is not to rely on the appearance, but to use the hue clock to quickly check all of the skin tones, and make sure the poiinter is the length of an hour hand, and pointing where an hour hand would point for a time between 12:15 and 1:30. Since this is the demo, you’ll be mostly using the hue clock for checking, after you fix things in Photoshop, and not really using the pin feature as such.
In some cases – for very light skinned individuals, the clock can point straight up, but this is relatively unusual. If it points before 12:00, your skin tone is starting to be too purple, and at 1:00 or later, it’s starting to get too yellow. The length, which indicates saturation, is important as well. It it’s extending too far, the saturation is too high. If it’s too short, the color is too muted.
Keep me posted on your results. I’ve had one student who is color blind report that he is no longer getting any criticism for flesh tones (from his brother in law no less 🙂 after learning this technique. Keep the clock hand in the right range – roughly lunch hour – and you’re golden. —
Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com