Request better support skin tone evaluation/measurement

Question

Hello. I am writing this with the intention that it will be read by the folks at Adobe that are involved in the development of Lightroom. I'm pretty new to this forum, however, and I'm a little confused about whether this feature requests thread actually goes to the Adobe Lightroom team, considering that it is in a user-to-user forum. If there is a better avenue to get my feature request to Adobe, I would appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction.
Before I get into my request, I also want to mention that I did my due diligence and searched this thread to make sure this has not been requested before.
I am submitting this request because I do not see any useful way to measure or evaluate skin tone in Lightroom while adjusting white balance (or after adjusting white balance, for that matter). I can do a mouse-over to read RGB values, but I am not aware of any useful way to use RGB values for evaluating skin tones.
I just watched the latest George Jardine video, in which he recommends to use a calibrated monitor and move the Develop controls back and forth until your eye tells you it's correctly adjusted. I enjoyed this video, and I have found that this generally works well for me for tone balance, but I believe an additional tool for measuring or evaluating skin tones would benefit the Lightroom workflow as I will explain below.
I believe that many serious photographers, pro and amateur alike, routinely use the eyedropper in Photoshop for reading CMYK values to confirm the skin tones in their work. Even if they feel like they can usually eyeball pretty well, they find they get greater consistency when they use the eyedropper.
Now I'm not saying that Lightroom necessarily needs CMYK support. Photoshop Elements, for example has a skin tone adjustment even though it doesn't have CMYK support. And I'm also not suggesting that Lightroom necessarily needs skin tone sliders like Photoshop Elements. I'm just suggesting that the Lightroom workflow would benefit from some kind of tool for evaluating skin tone while or after adjustments are being made in the Develop Module. I would like to leave it up to Lightroom to decide exactly how to implement this.
The only way I currently see to do adjust while measuring skin tones is to open the file in Photoshop, make adjustments, and save. Even if there is a way to do this with ACR and have the adjustments saved in the sidecar or in the DNG, it still seems like a time-comsuming and unnecessary step for my workflow.
Now this request is predicated on the assumption that evaluting skin tone is fundamental enough for a basic workflow that it should be included in Lightroom. In my opinion it is, and that is why I am making this feature request. I'm sure that some might not need it for their workflow, but it seems to me that this would be a valuable feature to a great many Lightroom users.
Thanks for lending your ear, Adobe. I look forward to ALL your future versions of Lightroom, and I hope that skin tone evaluation/measurement is included in one of them.
Regards,
Mike

Answer 1

Your post seems to assume that Lightroom is a tool for travel/landscape photography, and other types of photography (e.g., portrait/fashion) should be supported by a "specialized add-on module". I have to disagree with you on that point. Considering many of the examples on the Lightroom marketing are fashion shoots, I would think that they considers portrait/fashion photographers to be an important part of their target audience. They are not a fringe group of specialists.
I'm sure that portrait/fashion photographers would feel the same way about a Lightroom capability that primarily benefits the workflow of a travel/landscape photographer, i.e., when I do do some landscape work, I just edit in Photoshop. But you wouldn't agree to that, would you?
Skin tone measurement can be an incredibly easy tool to implement. It can be something as simple as showing the CMY values alongside the RGB values during a mouseover. Keep in mind, I'm talking about CMY not CMYK, so there should be no need to worry about what ICC profile to use. RGB to CMY is a straightforward transformation. It's embarassingly simple.
There are other ways Adobe can implement skin tone management that would be more powerful but a little more complicated. Those would be great too.
Anyway, thanks for the link to the Adobe feature request page! I will use it.
Regards,
Mike