@ Eric - In my experience "good" skin tones are more a function of lighting than they are of the camera. I'll agree that a lot of digital cameras don't have accurate white balance, but that is an easy fix in ACR. People with light skin are especially affected by color casts from surrounding objects and the color/ quality of light. Brown is related to skin tones in the same way that orange is: brown=dark orange. If you want to brighten faces but leave surrounding colors intact (lots of things in photos are orange and brown) then use the ACR adjustment brush. The problem with adjusting a photo based purely off of a color selection is that editing programs don't know what part of the photo you're adjusting unless you tell it through masks or specific selection. With the ACR adjustment brush it is easy to apply specific color/tone/exposure adjustments to exact areas of your photo. I use a canon 5dmkii (as does a third of the wedding/portrait/advertising world) and can honestly say the only times I've had issues with skin tones are from really bad lighting sources or color casts. When you see hassalblad photos with great skin tones it's most likely that people using hasselblads also know how to use good lighting.... and how to post process. I'm not telling you that you're wrong, I'm just saying a lot of people use ACR and DSLRs and get great photos and skin tones. Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2011 13:03:19 -0700 From: forums@adobe.com To: ithedanman@hotmail.com Subject: + Camera Raw Feature Requests + The Targeted Adjustment tool is nice, but as you said - it can affect other colors, like reds, oranges and yellows in some other regions of the photo. I still believe that Browns, which are closely related to skin tones, should receive a discrete adjustment. This would really help light-up a person's face in a manner that I, the photographer, intended. For example, colorists working on Hollywood films are paid a lot for the purpose of lighting-up faces in a certain manner. And after taking tens of thousands of photos, with many years of experience with post-production - I can tell you that it's very hard to get a good skin-tone in a photo. I've seen very few still cameras that can do that, and most of them are in the Medium Format league (Hasselblad, Mamiya, etc.). And just for reference - I'm using a 10bit capable LCD covering 95% of Adobe RGB, with the entire 10bit path connected as it should (Quadro card->DP cable -> 10bit capable LCD->Deep Color enabled in Software->PS CS5 set to use OpenGL), so that I can see the image possible when working on a photo. So I think I know what I'm talking about.
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