The key to balancing out an uneven skin tone is finding a way of targeting problem areas without affecting the rest of the skin. The Selective Color adjustment is a fantastic tool for this, allowing you to change the CMYK values in a primary color without affecting any of the other primary colors. In terms of this tutorial, this tool gives you a huge amount of control over the colour and luminosity of the skin in an image. Also, don’t let the time on the clock in the the screenshots fool you. This whole process only really took 5-10 minutes but I was eating my lunch and chatting on the phone at the time!
1. I’ve chosen a photo of a baby to illustrate this technique. Newborn skin tends to be extremely uneven in terms of colour and is generally fairly patchy, however the same technique can be applied to any portrait.
2. There are a couple of areas in this image that obviously need correcting, the main one being the hand. Babies tend to have very purple hands and feet when they’re born so its important to be able to correct this. Select the Lasso tool and set the feather to somewhere around 40-50px. The amount of feathering will vary depending on the size of the areas you are targeting but I find 40-50px to be a fairly good starting point. Make a rough selection and click the adjustment layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette or choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer and add a Selective Color adjustment. A layer mask will be created based on your selection.
3. In the case of the hand we need to deal with the Magenta range first. If skin is very pink it will react to adjustments made to the Magenta channel but for relatively normal skin tones it seems to have very little effect. In most cases if you decrease the Magenta slider you may need to also increase the yellow slider.
All major changes to skin colour will be made in the red channel. Reducing the Magenta slider considerably, adding in some Yellow and a touch of Cyan seemed to give me a skin tone that more closely resembled the rest of the skin. I also felt that the the hand was too dark so I decreased the Black slider in the red channel. This lightens the redness and can be a very useful slider when used on its own.
4. The baby’s right cheek looks a little too pink and dark. The Lasso tool should still be active so make another loose selection and click the adjustment layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette again. Add another Selective Color adjustment. Decrease the Magenta channel to reduce pinkness and decrease the Black slider to lighten the area.
5. Both arms could do with a bit of work. The left arm looks a little pink and the right arm looks a little pale and cold in comparison to the rest if the skin. Make another selection with the Lasso tool and add another Selective Color layer adjustment. The Magenta slider has been substantially reduced as has the yellow. A negative adjustment of the Cyan slider has added a touch of Red into the skin and the Black slider adjustment has lightened the whole area.
6. The whole right arm looks a little pale so make another selection and add yet another Selective Color adjustment. To warm the arm up I’ve added increased the Yellow slider, increased the Magenta slider slightly and decreased the Cyan slider which adds Red. The overall lightness of the arm looks about right so there’s no need to adjust the Black slider.
7. By now you should see how quick and easy these adjustments are to make and how they can help even out the skin. I tend to adjust the larger areas of an image first before moving on to the smaller adjustments. As you can see there are a lot of layers here but many of them are extremely small adjustments, almost unnoticeable on their own. However, combined there is quite a dramatic difference.
8. There are a still a few areas in this image that need fixing, particularly the baby’s chin and wrist. There doesn’t seem to be much red in the skin around these areas so a Selective Color adjustment probably wouldn’t really help much. We can still use the same Lasso technique to make our selection but a Curves adjustment will do a better job of correcting these areas. In fact, once you get used to seeing the subtle differences in skin tone colour and brightness you could do this whole thing with using Curves adjustments instead of Selective Colour.
The first obvious thing to correct is the overall brightness of the baby’s chin and this is easily achieved by darkening the RGB channel. The chin was also a little too Yellow so I’ve added a touch of Blue to compensate for this by increasing the curve in the Blue channel. I have also added a touch of Magenta by pulling the curve down slightly in the Green channel.
9. I could probably get away with leaving the wrist but it just looks a little too bright for my taste. The area I need to darken is very small so I’ve changed the Lasso feather to 10px. With the selection active I’ve added another Curves adjustment and darkened the area by pulling down the RGB curve. I’ve also added in a touch of Red by increasing the curve in the Red channel.
10. The final adjustment is just going to brighten the edge of the baby’s palm. It’s probably unnecessary but I thought it might help tie the brighter area of the wrist and the hand together a little better.
Before:
After:
by Alan
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