Inspiring

Answered

What are the technical details that make turning black skin to white difficult?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
March 10, 2024
6 replies
5191 views

I am not that advanced in my editing skills. But I can change the color of a dress, replace the head, correct a skin tone and texture, remove lens flare, and stuff like that.

I have been trying to find an easy and straightforward way to turn black skin into white, but couldn't understand why technically there doesn't seem to be an easy way. I mean what in the color details that make this look impossible given the advanced tools we have in photo manipulation programs like PS.

Among what I tried is using a gradient map layer putting the desired color in the middle and moving the slider to the left. I tried putting the desired color on the left. I tried the colorize option in hue/sat. layer. I tried solid color layer with hue and color blending modes. I tried curves layer to brighten the skin first and then applying a gradient map, hue/sat. or solid color layers.

I also tried extracting the white skin color from the black skin color, and then adding the extracted color over with a linear dodge (add) blending mode.

Nothing worked.

I have no other purpose, but I'm curious, what is it in the color details that make turning black skin into white such a complete job?

Experiment

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer PSKer

I haven't mention any color name. Have you seen the sample psd file that I attached above?
By @PSKer

No color name is needed. I looked at the layers in your file, and you may want to try a different approach. I started over with your base layer, and got the results below. I based this on a simple color-changing technique that you can learn in the Photoshop Training Channel tutorial video at the end of this post. That technique uses just two layers: A Solid Color Fill layer set to Color blending mode, and a Levels adjustment layer used only to remap the tones. Both are masked to the dark hand through a layer group mask. I tried to achieve more control by replacing the Solid Color fill layer with a Gradient Map layer, and by replacing Levels with Curves. I wanted to see if adding color stops to the Gradient Map would provide more color variation from light to shadow.

For this example it wasn’t necessary to know what the color value numbers should be…I simply sampled the color from the light skin, and that set the initial target values.

In my version, the mask edge where the two hands meet does not look good because I didn’t spend much time on that part. You might also want to retouch the areas on the light hand that were near the original dark hand, because the now lighter skin should reflect more light on the hand on the right.

Great job and thank you for sharing the tutorial. I still haven't good results as good as yours. But I'll try again some other time.

davescm

Community Expert

In terms of Hue both skin colours are remarkably similar. What varies is the luminance and saturation. This is the principle of the skin tone line on a vectorscope (commonly used in colour grading video). Your difficulty, leaving aside ethical issues, will be adjusting the luminance and saturation ranges (there is no single value or single range) to look natural whilst leaving hue unaffected.

https://larryjordan.com/articles/color-correction-make-people-look-normal/

https://creativecloud.adobe.com/cc/learn/premiere-pro/web/correct-skin-tones

Dave

P

PSKerAuthor

Inspiring

I've been studying the articles you gave me. They are very informative and I appreciate that you've given them to me. But they are irrevant to what I'm asking.

davescm

Community Expert

Sorry that you found them irrelevant. They were there to show what you should be aiming at is adjusting the luminance and saturation but leaving the hue unchanged. You can do that with curves and appropriate blending modes.

Dave

Conrad_C

Community Expert

The difficulty may have to do with understanding the color value proportions for “black” and “white” skin tones. I put those in quotes to emphasize that they’re not pure black or white. Of course you know that already, but my point is, making it convincing depends on ending up with skin tone values within an expected RGB or CMYK color range for the specific ethnicities you’re working with.

I’m not an expert on what those color values are, I just know that for example, some prepress photo technicians with many years of experience know in their heads what CMYK color values to aim for when editing human skin tones. I think I also read somewhere that the main difference between “white” and darker skin tones was the amount of cyan. So what you probably want to do is some research into the target RGB or CMYK color values that are generally recognized in the portrait/retouching industry for various ethnicities, and use the color monitoring tools in Photoshop (such as the color samplers and Info panel) to make sure you are guiding your skin tone colors into that range.

L

Lumigraphics

Legend

Lighter skin tones are mostly orange.

L

Lumigraphics

Legend

I don't think I would even try that. And I'm pretty experienced with Photoshop.

P

PSKerAuthor

Inspiring

I'm not sure why you wouldn't. But my purpose is to find out why it isn't easy or straightforward, and if it is, I want to know. It's a matter of curiousity.

L

Lumigraphics

Legend

I wouldn't because I suspect that its technically pretty close to impossible. The tonal map will be completely different. As a very experienced pro, I can tell you that you have to account for skin tone when lighting a portrait subject.

D Fosse

Community Expert

Basically the luminance is different, which changes the whole tone response curve. That quickly gets tricky, especially for subtle skin tones. The color in itself is the least problem.

P

PSKerAuthor

Inspiring

I didn't get you. Can you explain it for a newbie?

c.pfaffenbichler

Community Expert

As @didiermazier already mentioned please post a sample image (or more) and screenshots with the pertinent Panels (Toolbar, Layers, Options Bar, …) visible of the attempts you were dissatisfied with.

Feel free to crop them to the pertinent areas.

Do you work with RAW images?

Is the problem the overall appearance or (in part) the masking?

P

PSKerAuthor

Inspiring

At the moment I'm not working with RAW images. And there is no problem with the appearance. Recently I edited a photo of my black friend (without having to change her skin color), and she was impressed with both the outcome and my humble skills.

I am just curious and want to now why.

didiermazier

Community Expert

hard to say without seeing the pic ture you want to edit…

BTW Black is Beautiful!

P

PSKerAuthor

Inspiring

I agree black is beutiful. I am trying to understand the art and the technical details.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded