Skin tone balance? (as opposed to white balance)

much like there's a way of automating white balance (through the eye-dropper or auto-WB), i wonder if there's a way of matching skin tones. is there some sort of "match hue" option where you can make someone's forehead be the same hue in every photo (without doing it manually)?
there's such an option in apple's final cut pro in the 3-way color corrector. it's a very handy and time-saving feature.
thanks!

This is only half the answer. Have you seriously tried to edit large numbers of files with this method? It's an exercise in frustration.
I just started up Aperture to see how many Tabs it takes to go from White Balance to Exposure, 7 from memory as it highlights every sub-menu along the way. I say from Memory because it decides this time (a first) it's not going to move to the next field no matter how many times Tab is pressed. And when my workflow is Exposure, then White Balance, (don't get me started about bright sparks who tell you to do it the other way), then H&S, then Saturation, which is how many Tabs? Somewhere between 35 and 40. And you have to take your eyes of the screen to see where you are.
I've said this quite a few times in these forums, and yes, I have posted a number of times in the feedback, that the best implementation of this is Capture 1 where (on PC) Control +/- controls exposure, Shift +/- White Balance etc. And it works perfectly on a network, unlike Bridge which just keeps crashing.
As someone who edits anywhere between 1100 and 2000 CR2 files a week there is no way I could use Aperture in our Companies workflow. I use it for my personal work where time and volume are not crucial considerations but file management is.
Even though Capture 1 is long in the tooth, ie no H&S, no Recovery yadda, yadda, yadda, to my knowledge no other Professional level RAW processor has this direct entry of important adjustment values and once used any other method is just tedious.
While I love most of the other features, in my opinion, the Tab method of moving between adjustments as implemented in Aperture is half baked and very buggy.
End of rant.
Cheers,
Terry

Similar Messages

Request better support skin tone evaluation/measurement

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

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

Skin Tones

What are some ways of getting correct skin tones, I've tried custom white balance and the tones are still off. Help please.

Here's a video on correcting skin tones without having to resort to CMYK and using LR's RGB values:
Low Rez (YouTube)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWaFDKrNrwc
High Rez
http://digitaldog.net/files/SkinToneVideo.mov

Quick Help Please!!!!... White balance 6 HD Cameras

Hey guys/gals (I only have 2 hours before I ship out)... I have an important gig tonight shooting a live event. I have 6 cameras all at different distances to the stage. The stage is reasonable and evenly lit. How should I white balance all of these cameras (Sony FX-1s and Z1Us)?
I want to use the manual White Balance in the cameras so they all have the same color temperature instead of 'auto' mode? What I realized today (which I hope I'm wrong) is that I'll have these cameras set up at different distances, they will all have to zoom in at different focal lengths (which effects the f-stops as well) to reach the White Card on the stage for the Manual White Balance. Should I White Balance the cameras this way? Will all the cameras have a slightly different White Blance due to the different Focal length?
Or should I place all of them in the same spot in front of the stage, go Wide (or tight), and then White Balance all of the cameras at the same focal length and angle?
2 cameras will have a tight shot all night, 2 cameras will be a tight to medium shot and the last 2 will be medium to wide.
Sorry if I'm overreacting (slap me if so please), it's an important gig to me and the first time I did this gig over a year ago I had to do a big of color correction depending on the shot/camera.
Thanks for your time.
-Monty
P.S. - I have a set of Warm Cards and a huge white posterboard for the White Balance and the stage is all Tungsten Lighting... basically a crapload of floodlights... theatre setting, no spotlights.

Good on ya for taking the time to learn to do this beforehand but I may have done some testing first.
TheMonty wrote:
Will all the cameras have a slightly different White Blance due to the different Focal length?
Probably not although you'll have a flare imbalance between the cameras due to the different focal lengths. No two cameras, not even the same model, will ever white balance exactly like the other, there will always be minute differences. You will also want to black balance all your cameras as well.
However, white/black balance is a small part of the imaging pie. In reality you'd really want to chart these cameras with a [DSC Labs Chrome do Monde|http://www.dsclabs.com/chromadumonde.htm] as a simple white balance will not address differences in flare/gamma balance, or inequities in the white clipper channels. When you chart a camera you null out all the variances in the r,g,b channels which creates a better white balance over all.
The color section of the Chrome du Monde helps match the color matrices of your video cameras, something else a simple white/black balance will not do.
Good luck.

Is there a good white balance plug-in for Premiere Elements?

Now that I've discovered and installed the Mercalli V2 Stabilizer plug-in (wow, is it great!), I think that the only thing lacking in Premiere Elements 10 is a plug-in to correct white balance.
What I'm talking about is a simple warmer / cooler temperature adustment plug-in.

A true white balance correction plug-in is no comparison to using the three-level Color Corrector or Color Enhancer.
If anyone has done extensive work on still images in Adobe Photoshop as I have, there's absolutely no comparison.
Yes, one can noodle around with the existing tools and kind of get there, but it requires a strong working knowledge of color balance variables.
A white balance plug-in has a simple warmer / cooler slider and can adjust white balance in a couple of seconds without skewing basic color components.

White Balancing utilityを自分のプログラムから操作する

はじめまして。visual C++を利用しておりますが、初心者でわからないことがたくさんありますので、質問させてください。
よろしくお願いします。
私は現在大学の研究で、貴社のボード（箱などを紛失してしまい名前がわからないです）とWhite Balancing utilityと
SONYのCAMERA ADAPTOR DC-700とCCDカメラを用いて画像を撮影しています。
その中でvisual C++で自分が作成したプログラムからWhite Balancing utilityを起動・操作して画像を640×480のサイズで保存したいと考えています。
このようなプログラムの作成することは可能でしょうか？
もし、可能でしたら、簡単な作り方等も教えていただけませんでしょうか？
よろしくお願いします。

平素より弊社製品をご使用いただき誠に有難うございます。
日本ナショナルインスツルメンツ技術部の竹内と申します。
White Balancing UtilityはEXEファイルになっておりますので、C++から起動は可能かと思いますが、C++からの制御は難しいかと存じます。White Balancing Utility自体はインストール時にデフォルトパスを選択されているのであれば、「C:\Program Files\National Instruments\NI-IMAQ\Utility」にWhite Balancing Utility.exeとして保存されています。参考になるかわかりませんが、Microsoft社のサポートページに下記のような記事がございましたので、ご参照下さい。
Visual C++ .NET でファイル名を使用してアプリケーションを起動する方法
また、White Balancing Utilityの機能をC++のコードの中に実装させるという方法もあります。C++ではないのですが、Vision Development Moduleを使用せずにWhite Balancing Utilityと同じ機能を実装する試みが下記弊社ディスカッションフォーラムでされていましたので、ご紹介いたします。
Is it possible to create a program similar to Vision's White Balancing Utility without Vision Devel...
以上、ご不明な点等ございましたらご連絡下さい。
よろしくお願い申し上げます。
日本ナショナルインスツルメンツ技術部
竹内

AUTO Tone vs. White Balance

The AUTO button seems a bit too "insensitive" to changes of white-balance "tint". What I mean is that manual changes of tint need to change by a certain number before the AUTO Tone button becomes available again. There seem to be brackets of tint value (like -13 to +29 using the same AUTO Tone setting).
What I noticed is that sometimes this may not be exact, for example changing between AUTO WB and Custom WB may not follow the same bracket and thus lead to slightly different AUTO Exposure results (0.05 difference only, though).
On its own the Auto WB seems to be quite useful for us beginner by the way. I just used it on some old Samsung pocket-cam JPG that was seriously into the blue and liked the outcome.

The AUTO button seems a bit too "insensitive" to changes of white-balance "tint". What I mean is that manual changes of tint need to change by a certain number before the AUTO Tone button becomes available again. There seem to be brackets of tint value (like -13 to +29 using the same AUTO Tone setting).
What I noticed is that sometimes this may not be exact, for example changing between AUTO WB and Custom WB may not follow the same bracket and thus lead to slightly different AUTO Exposure results (0.05 difference only, though).
On its own the Auto WB seems to be quite useful for us beginner by the way. I just used it on some old Samsung pocket-cam JPG that was seriously into the blue and liked the outcome.

ACR/Canon D5 Colour Balance - nasty pinkish skin tones

I use macbook pro, 2.33GHz/3GB 667MHz RAM with CS3 and ACR 4.3.1. I shoot Canon D5.
When I shoot RAW, I get this strange pinkish look to the skin tones that I can't seem to correct. I've experimented with colour balance and hue, and the HSL and camera calibration tools, but not happy yet.
Apologies if this is a basic issue, but would love some advice.
Thanks.

I think that is a standard catch-all message but it really is a poor show that a simple download page is so often unavailable.
Just part of the new look Adobe. It really is a pity there's no serious competition yet, but if they keep going downhill at the present rate there will be!

White Balance tool and Camera Calibration Profiles

Downloaded Lightroom v4 Beta 1 for mac but the installer package failed to launch. (com.apple.installer.pagecontroller error -1.) So I've only watched the adobe tv presentations todate.
Anyway just wanted to give some feedback as a pro photographer about use of Lightroom and improvments I would like to see in the next version.
I am a commercial photographer who needs colour accuracy in photographing fashion/garment images - most of my work is reproduced on a printing press for catalogues and brochures. On average a shoot will yeild about 500 images for a client, so workflow is important as they normally want them all!
As a previous user of Capture One Pro v6 and now lightroom v3.6 - the biggest issue I have with Lightroom is the dominace of red tint when setting the white balance from a gray card reference image, shot at the same time as the images to be processed. I'm not adding anything to the images other than doing a white balance, a tweak on exposure and camera neutral setting on profiles.
To obtain a white balance setting I use the combination of an Xrite white balance card and the Q-Card and the old fasioned Kodak Gray cards all mounted on the same surface. I've used spot and ambient light readings on the gray cards to measure exposure and I've used the Adobe DNG Profiler and the Xrite colour checker profiler with the large colour checker card as a reference, (I've made profiles for sunny days, cloudy days, dual illuminant etc etc) and I'm viewing my images on a colour calibrated apple monitor.
Not withstanding all of the above the best results I get out of Lightroom are using the camera profile neutral setting! Everthing else is just too red!! even though the images do look more punchy; for accuracy of actual colour I choose the camera neutral profile.
Well when I say best results, those for colour critical garment photography and skin tones, these results are similar to those obtained from capture one pro v6.
So for the Lightroom v4 I would like to see.
1. White balance RGB values in numbers rather than percentages.
2. Add and delete a colour readouts points with a dropper tool on an image to enable more acurate colour balancing particularly in shadow areas - (already available on capture one pro and adobe photoshop)
3. Curves adjustments in all RGB channels (think you've done this)
4. Output to CMYK profiles.
5. Individual levels channel adjustment for RGB
6. Ability re-organize my tools palette (add and remove) is per Capture One and Photoshop
Regards

The legacy ACR X.x profiles are no more produced nor included for newer cameras (AFAIK, since ACR 5.1/LR 2.1). The Adobe Standard is the new default starting point for these.
While I am at it....are the Canon camera profiles I downloaded for the 1Ds MKII the same as for the 5D MKII or do I have to download different one...I suspect they are the same or Lightroom wouldn't offer them to me...is that correct?
The profiles are different for each camera model, even if they share the same name in the Calibration panel. If you can see them when developing 5DII files, it means the camera-specific profiles are installed for your particular camera model (otherwise, you wouldn't see them).

White balance needs adjustment in RAW

I have a Canon 60D and shoot with AWB almost 100% of the time. I don't trust my self to switch between settings when moving from sun to shade to inside. On a recent trip I shot in RAW format for the first time. I was very happy with the results AFTER I changed the white balance from "As Shot" to "Daylight" for nearly every outdoor shot. (Using Camera Raw 8.5) The results this way are better than any adjustment I get to the JPG. Does this sound like a camera problem, PE problem, or just the way it is?

fishcad a écrit:
Thanks. It's not a huge problem but it would be nice if PS Elements allowed batch operations since I do this to so many photos. Just had some indoor photos from a wrestling tourney where changing the WB in Camera Raw from "As shot" to "Auto" made a big improvement to skin tones.
To keep the same settings for different pictures in ACR:
- Use the 'previous conversion' settings in the 'basic' tab drop-down menu
- open several images in ACR at the same time and apply the same choice.

D3 + "Auto" White Balance in LR2 = +30 Magenta

I have been finding some problems with the "Auto" white balance setting in LR2...
Since I started shooting RAW with my D3 (while still shooting with my D70 in the same locations) LR2 likes to give me a +30 Magenta whenever I choose Auto no matter where or what I'm shooting.
I don't suffer the same adjustment shooting RAW on the D70 (interchanging the same lenses.)
Anybody else seeing this issue? I'm shooting Auto WB on the D3 almost all the time and I end up having to manually perform any WB tweaks in LR otherwise everything is too "pink."

While generally agreeing that a gray-card white-balance measurement is more accurate and eyedropping something that glows in UV light is a problem, in this particular case, if the dress does indeed look white to the eye, and the people that will be viewing and purchasing the pictures expect it to be white, then white-balancing on the dress can be ok.
In this particular instance the issue seems to be that there is mixed lighting between the sky and the trees so the particular part of the dress being eyedropped changes things, and the angle of the gray-card would make a difference, so the multiple angles of fabric in the dress may offer a wider range of "targets" where one is more accurate than the gray-card.
I wish LR would allow the Auto WB to be restricted to the cropped area of a photo, so you could crop it down to just the gray-card or in this case the front of the dress and have it guess more correctly.
The maximum area that can be sampled by the WB-dropper is too small and the area sampled for the Auto WB is too large for LR to be the most helpful in certain situations.
Being able to eyedropper a non-neutral area, such as the skin and compute the color-balance as compared to a library of skin tones, would also be very helpful.
Elements lets you color-balance a photo based on skin tones, and you can do this thing by hand in Photoshop Levels/Curves by referring to RGB values, but I wish LR would be helpful in this regard, as well.
I realize this is what the DNG Profile Converter and Colormunki are letting you do, but having to create a permanent profile and install it and use it are not the same as being able to create an image-specific profile and use it in place of WB across several images.
Why shouldn't I be able to have someone hold up a color-checker and have LR compute an image-specific color-balance based on that.
The other thing LR should allow is have an eyedropper help with determining the highlight and shadow tint hue/sat values.

White Balance in Color

I have been using Color for my first short film and I wanted to get feedback about my process in balancing the white balance. Color is absent the easy white balance eye-dropper. So this is my process in the Primary In room.
1. Balance the contrast - crushing blacks and boosting the highlights.
2. Balance skin tone using the mid-tones color wheel.
3. "Eye-ball" the white balance by moving the Highlights color wheel until I achieve whites I deem white.
Do the scopes help me balance the white better? Is this a proper process? After I complete these steps I move to saturation and secondary CC.
Thoughts?
cja

If you were airline pilots, I'm not sure I'd want to fly with that carrier. Instruments are there for some reason, I guess, but you don't need 'em on ultralights, but on second thought maybe that's why there are so many stall-spin fatals. Hmmmmm. Well, anyway...
COLOR does have an auto balance, but it needs something in the frame that really wants to be R=G=B, because that is what it does, after sneaking a peak at where the corresponding Y-luminance sits. Sometimes its a reasonable starting point. But if the brightest thing in the picture really is a brilliant blue, then it won't work.
COLOR is concatenated Primary In, Secondary, COLORFX, Primary Out deliberately. The opening premise is to achieve a balanced, non-clipped, non-crushed image to send onwards for qualified-area corrections, look enhancement, and then overall final contrast, overexposure and black crushing at the end in Primary OUT. That was the idea. Its how Silicon Color trained the first round of Final Touch operators. You are free to pursue any avenue that achieves the result you desire.
Use of instruments. It is possible to use the scopes to achieve balance, especially using the vectorscope display. One of the simplest concepts is to learn to "lay the furball over the origin". Eventually you will figure out what part of the furball corresponds to the white point, the black origin, and how to guide the values into a particular area, especially when hue matching scene-to-scene in the still store. One of the egregious drawbacks of the COLOR scopes is the omission in the RGB parade of the Y signal. That would be most helpful (to people who pay attention to that stuff) and its why its the default on most outboard scopes. I'm particularly fond of the Tektronix Double-Diamond gamut display... makes getting a grey scale as simple as "standing up" the two trees.
Strictly speaking you don't really need to know what the exact numbers are, until you try to get a project past a QA somewhere. Those people have no sense of humour.
jPo

Can't get decent white balance

I shot some photos with my Canon EOS outside with the white balance set to 3200. The photos are, of course, blue. In iPhoto, using the slider, I can get almost perfectly corrected white balance with great skin tones. Bringing the photos into Aperture and using the white balance correction slider doesn't get me close to what iPhoto did. What's up with this?
RM

It’s a common problem. Usually because of PC monitors being back lit and often set very bright. So the representation on the PC will be different compared with on photo paper. Nice image by the way.
Most labs use the sRGB color space; so make sure you are saving your print copy with that profile. If you view your image on screen by getting down on your knees, and looking up at your monitor rather than from eye level, you will get an indication of how dark the image really is.
I always make separate copies for print with an overall levels adjustment and with sharpening as the final edit, based on each different print size. I would suggest for this image moving the middle pointer to 1.75 but you may need to experiment with different settings. Make a test batch and compare them when you get them back from Walmart to see which works best and use that in future.

White Balance Why ?

Hello All, I am by professional standards a beginner videographer of about 5 years experience. I have seen lots of advice around saying set your white balance for this or that lighting. I film a lot of theatre shows with lots of vivid colour, when I used auto white balance the colours were always wrong different shades ETC so I bought a grey card and set my white balance using this and the colours now look very similar to what I am filming. My question is why would you change your white balance according to lighting ? surely once it is set correctly you want it to accurately reflect what the camera is seeing.

I seldom have the opportunity to do a manual white balance at stage shows, because when I arrive to set up cameras, the house lights are on and the curtain closed and I have no access to the "actual show lighting" until the show is going. So I just use the "Incandescent" setting on all cameras and that has worked well for me. Lighting can and will change throughout the show also, so at least if all cameras are set the same, the color is consistent and I can make tweaks when editing.
Of course, when I have the opportunity I will always go for the manual white balance (or preset that looks good) for best results.
Different light sources (sunlight, overcast, incandescent, flourescent, etc.) all have different color "temperatures". Some are warmer (redder), some are cooler (more blue), and so forth. I vaguely remember some of this from sixtth-grade science class, with "kelvin" numbers and such. The human eye compensates for this automatically and always see white objects as white, and other colors then follow suit. Video cameras are not so good at this - AWB attempts it, but doesn't always get it right. That is why the presets and manual option, to TELL the camera, THIS IS WHITE. Once it is calibrated to what "white" is, then all the colors look correct under that particular light source.
To a degree, footage shot with the wrong WB can be corrected during editing, but often it can be so far out of whack that it never looks quite right. There is no substitute for getting it right when shooting! If someone looks like a blueberry or a sun-burned Martian on tape, good luck getting a nice skin tone in post....
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

White Balance Sheet

hi guys,
this thread is addressing/asking you pro-product photographers...
to allow a perfect white balance, i have shot photos with a page having white, grey and black references on it in the image, then cropping it. however, i have lost the page and i have no idea where i have that file. instead of creating a new one - do you guys have such a document handy to share (pdf or so) so it can be printed and be placed in the photo at the next shooting?
or do you use other/pre-produced reference cards?
in case you don't have such a document - would anybody be interested if i create one and share it here? let me know.

You are raising a thorny problem. First if you are
shooting in a place where you know in advance there
will be no neutrals then try to make a shot at the
beginning with a white paper business card or some
other neutral. The White Balance won't change so much
from shot to shot.
You need to find something in the image that you
'know' to be nutral. About L level 80 or higer works
best for me but I have seen others in this forum
reccomend more medium grays. but not so high that one
of the channels is clippiing at 255.
If there are no neutrals and also no skin tones in
the images your WB can be pretty subjective (far from
the actual scene) and it will look OK. Aperture has
the auto adjust RGB button that will stretch the
three histograms seperately to fill the full tonal
range. I think that it was Andrew Rodney who
published that as the 90% rule (it works 90% of the
time).
For some reason adjusting the three histograms in
Aperture doesn't work as well for me as it does in
Photoshop when I use the Auto Levels - separate
command. But adjusting the R, G, and B channels
manually using the Levels adjust still gives a good
result.
I find that there are really very few images with no
neutrals for the WB clicker to latch onto, less than
5% for my shooting.
Thanks for taking the time to explain.
What does “About L level 80” refer to? Is this on the RGB readout?

Skin tone balance? (as opposed to white balance)

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