Photo Tips | Skin Tones

Nasty, alien looking skin tones are a big pet peeve of mine. Be it too orange, too ashy, too dull, or too saturated, an icky looking skin tone can be the death of an otherwise good photo. This can be a pretty perplexing issue and in times past, I’ve found that any quick fixes I’d make to the skin tones would damage other areas of the image. Now that I’ve gotten more experience by trial and error, here are my suggestions for how to get beautiful looking, natural skin tones.

Perfect Exposures
My number one rule for getting beautiful, creamy, luminescent skin tones is to always expose for the skin in any given photo. I tend to prefer high-key images, so for me, a proper skin exposure is going to be a little bit brighter than what my camera may be telling me. Just ignore that. You know what kind of exposure you need so manually set it for yourself and just go. If I can get my exposure the way I want it IN camera, I will need to make very few adjustments in post processing later. Easy!

Shoot Wide Open
My second general rule of thumb is to shoot wide open or as close to wide open as I can, generally at least f2.8 – f1.4. I do this in order to create a very shallow depth of field so that everything that is not directly under my focus point will be ever so slightly and softly out of focus. This is the best technique for getting a creamy looking skin tone that just seem to look perfect. Shooting wide open acts like an in-camera retouching tool that can help smooth over and hide skin imperfections. The only trick to it is that you need to be very critical of your focusing technique since you’re working with a very shallow depth of field. This translates to: zero wiggle room. It takes a little bit of practice but it’s not hard to learn! *Bonus TIp: If you’re used to only shooting and recomposing from the center focus point, try changing your focus point to one closer to the subject and then recompose if need be. My images were much more consistently in focus and sharp once I started doing this. This also takes a bit of practice but I promise it will eventually become second nature… (*Bonus TIp #2) …but only if you use the back button focusing technique.

HSL Sliders in Lightroom
If you can get a perfect exposure (and remember, perfect is what YOU want it to be, not always what your camera tells you it should be) and shoot in an aperture range of f2.8 – f1.4, you shouldn’t need much more to improve your skin tones. HOWEVER, even when you’re doing everything right, sometimes skin tones just come out looking wonky anyways. When this happen, get your butt in Lightroom and scroll immediately down to the HSL sliders. This is kind of my holy grail adjustment that I think will blow you away. It’s so simple yet so astounding. HSL sliders are powerful tools that allow you to adjust the hue, saturation and luminance of eight individual colors within one given image. When I can see that there is something amiss with my skin tones, I immediately try out the HSL sliders in the red, orange, and yellow families. Skin too orange? Drop the saturation a bit. Skin too dull? Boost the luminance. This is my personal FAV. I often like to increase the Luminance in the Red and Orange range to +10 or more. This just gives my skin tones a subtle za za zing without destroying the integrity of the rest of the image. *Bonus Tip #3: Another little trick I like to use is to boost my Vibrance to +25 while taking my Saturation down to around -10. Sometimes I’ll even try this before I try anything else. This is literally a 2 second fix that is subtle yet quickly takes the edge off of any orange skin nastiness. It can get tiring making these adjustments to every photo so I’ve simply created a preset called “Brie’s Luminescent Skin Tones”. I now apply the Luminance boost and the Vibrance/Saturation combo to a great number of all my photos. Yep, that’s my secret and I just told you. Now try it for yourself!

Don’t over do the Clarity
Since this Photo Tip is about skin tones (and I challenge you to count how many times I have typed those words so far), I feel it my duty to give a word of caution. Do NOT go overboard with the Clarity slider. Oh boy, the Clarity slider (contrast and detail finder) does some pretty incredible things in many applications, but I have found that if I am going for soft, perfect looking, skin tones, the Clarity can do more harm than good. If you’re used to boosting the Clarity in many of your images, stop and evaluate if it will really enhance the image or not. I think this slider gets way way too much use and in a bad way. (Halos, anyone?) But done right, I’m all about it. So just use it judiciously and you should be fine.

Here’s an example of an underexposed dud of a photo I took this weekend. The far left image is straight out of camera. It’s dark, unnatural looking, and blah. My bad. I didn’t nail my exposure on this one, obviously. In the middle image, I brought the exposure up in Lightroom so the dress would be bright but not lose any detail. Unfortunately, the skin is is still too dark and even more orange and fake looking. HSL sliders to the rescue! Since I wanted the wedding dress to remain at the same exposure, I chose to tweak only the orange and red tones of the image and nothing else. I decreased the saturation to around -20 and boosted the luminance to a whopping +55. The end result is something that looks much more natural and pleasing to the eye. Keep this in mind when photography weddings! You never want to lose detail in that beautiful dress so you have to think creatively about how to keep those details and still get a skin tone that looks natural.

To sum up: Nail your exposures, shoot wide open, befriend Lightroom’s HSL sliders, and boost Clarity sparingly. You got this, now go get it!