final portrait color

[pittman]

I'm having trouble with my wedding pictures having a pinkish skin tone. Is this a flash problem? Even in the studio the skin tones are not true. Any help would be great. Thanks

[Legend87]

I've had a similar problem.. especially in the highlights. Have you figured out any solution yet?

[memobug]

If the image gets overexposed (even a little) the tones can get strange. Gary Fong recommends shooting with auto white balance with the settings at ORG-ORG-HI. I typically use a STD sharpness -> ORG-ORG-STD.

Regards

Matt

[Joe Peoples]

One thing I've found is that there are several ways to skin the digital cat in Photoshop, so what I'm suggesting is one of perhaps several ways to go about addressing some of the concerns mentioned:

As far as the blown out highlights (wedding gowns) with direct flash: check your histogram and watch for good tonality from end to end, making sure you aren't too heavy on the right side, where the highlights are. When you open the file, it will be somewhat underexposed overall, with tonality in the gown. Duplicate the layer, using screen mode. Select the gown, then erase the top layer to taste.

Skin tones are a different story. We all have our own "flavor", for lack of a better word. Do a test with the different settings on the S2. Convert to CMYK, then pick a section of skintone to sample the color. Find the setting where M doesn't exceed Y (assuming the subject is not a child or a light-skinned person) and use that setting. Also, look at the Cyan channel and see if that reading is about 1/5th the amount of the Magenta value(Caucassian skin). You can create a custom curve to apply to your files, but it may be easier to alert your lab about your findings and let them do the corrections.

[Tom V]

When my output starts looking off color, with stinky pinks, or magenta hair highlights, I suspect my printer, or that the color profiles assigned to the image are incorrect.

Beats me how to fix it.

I still have trouble getting good color on my portraits. Luckily, my studio product shots have less of a problem - for reasons I have not figured out yet.