Photoshop 101: Correcting Skin Tones
Original image
Easy
Time
5-10 mins
We take a lot of pictures with our son, and he has really great skin color. The problem is, when my wife and I are in pictures with him, we always come out looking sunburned while he looks great. Luckily, there’s a quick and easy fix in Photoshop that just gets quicker with a little practice.
You can use this technique in all sorts of ways, but one of the most useful I’ve found is for correcting the skin tone of a portrait subject. For example, you can count on someone getting themselves actually sunburned while everyone else looks fine at least once in your photography days. Here’s how to fix it.
Step 1 – Create a Color Balance adjustment layer. After opening the file in Photoshop, go down to the layers palette and click the icon that’s a half black, half white circle. This pops up a menu for adjustment layers. Choose “Color Balance…”.
Adjustment layer menu
When the Color Balance dialog box opens, play with the sliders to get the skin fixed. At this stage you’re only paying attention to the problem areas. As you’re adjusting the sliders and the problem subject starts to look better, everyone else will look worse. But that’s okay, because in the next couple steps we’ll isolate the fix to just the problem subject. To fix red skin, just move the first two sliders away from red and magenta.
Color Balance dialog
Step 2 – Fill the adjustment layer with black. So now you have two layers: the image layer and the adjustment layer. Make sure you have the adjustment layer selected and go to the “Edit” menu and choose “Fill…”. When the dialog opens, fill the whole layer with black and hit OK.
Adjustment layer mask thumbnail
Step 3 – Paint in the effect. What we’re going to do here is to tell Photoshop what parts of the adjustment layer are to show through and what aren’t. You have the ability to “paint in” the adjustment to whatever parts of the image you want. Anything that is black means the adjustment doesn’t take effect. Anything white shows the effect. Shades of gray in between show varying amounts of the effect. Now that the layer is all black, we’ll just paint white in over my skin, so that the color correction only applies to my skin and not to any other part of the image.
Adjustment layer mask
So using the brush tool, simply paint white onto the areas that need color correction. As you paint you’ll see the skin turn from red to a nice natural color. If you stray outside the skin area, just touch it up with black to remove the effect. To see how you’re doing, you can view the adjustment layer mask by alt-clicking (or command-clicking on Mac) on the little black and white mask thumbnail on the layer palette, shown above.
When you alt-click on the mask thumbnail, the whole image will be replaced with the black and white mask so you can adjust it that way.
Watch the eyes and mouth. Notice that I’ve left the color correction effect off of the eyes and I’ve applied it lightly to the mouth. Taking the red off makes the color a little more yellow, and the last thing anyone wants is yellow eyes and yellow teeth! Also, lips should keep a little of their pink color; yellow lips don’t look so good either!
The Final Product – At the end of the process, here’s what I ended up with. The redness was removed from my face and neck, and the rest of the image is untouched.
Final image
Once you’ve done this technique a couple of times to fix photos, you’ll find that it’s a really fast and easy fix. If I hadn’t been taking screen shots for this article, this photo would have taken me around 60 seconds to fix. Give it a try the next time you find that someone or something in one of your pictures just seems a little out of place color wise.
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August 16th, 2007 at 9:41 am
[...] Read More… [...]
August 16th, 2007 at 9:48 am
How do you balance skin tones over a multitude of photos? Say I have five portrait shots of the same couple, but the light changed from one shot to another so that their skin tone looks different in each picture… can that be easily fixed or is there a peice of software or a photoshop plugin to help visually correct it?
August 16th, 2007 at 11:02 am
That’s a really great question Michael, and it’s one that I’ve struggled with myself. I’m not aware of any automated tool such as a Photoshop action that will help you do this faster. I think the difficulty here is the mask, where only part of the image is affected, and it can’t really be masked off by the software since you’d have to paint it in.
One thing you could do to take a little of the grunt work out is to create an action that will do the basic steps for you, such as creating the adjustment layer and filling it with black. Then you’d just have to pick the color values in the color balance layer and paint the mask. This would save you a little time on each photo that would add up.
I’ve never gone looking for any tools for this. I think I’ll do a little research and try to find one. If I do, you’d better believe it will make it’s way to an article here.
November 7th, 2007 at 10:46 am
Hey guys.
What about the match color feature in Photoshop? I’ve seen it in use a coupla times, but haven’t done it myself. You essentially have a source image and a target image. You tell PS what the source is and it puts that color onto the target…
January 20th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
[...] Photoshop 101: Correcting Skin Tones [...]
July 20th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
or you could easily repair it with nikons capture nx. Very simple and no masking or layers!
March 3rd, 2009 at 6:19 pm
haha ^^ nice, is there a section to follow the RSS feed
July 8th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Dear Tim,
i took your idea and found it also works if you set the colour balance layer then just use the erase tool to take out areas where you dont want the lighter colour. but thaks for a great tutorial, really helped me with some rather silly looking photos ^^
January 29th, 2010 at 2:19 am
I’ve been searching for this precise information on this subject for a long time.
August 17th, 2011 at 9:48 pm
I did steps one and two just as you said, except when i fill it in with black and then hit “Ok” the picture does not turn black like yours. It just returns to its normal color. What am I missing? I have CS5.5. Does that make a difference?
August 31st, 2011 at 4:58 pm
I have been desperately looking for a simple process like this as I suffer from Rosacea but I’m so disappointed that I couldn’t get it to work for me.
I’m using PS CS3 so maybe that’s the problem.
I get to the part where I use the brush with white paint, it shows up on the little thumbnail icon as white going on black but when I look at my photo the face is painted green.
I’ve checked the colour swatch at the bottom of the left legend and it says white foreground, so I don’t know why it shows up as green.
October 2nd, 2011 at 7:18 am
I am having the same issue as Mindy and Jim here. I”m using CS4. Are we missing a step when we use the Black fill? I go to edit, fill, and i pick black, leave all other boxes at their current values (mode normal, opacity 100%). The small thumb in the adj layer turns black but my photo it self does not (when i do the fill on the actual photo it turns all black, just an fyi). When I paint, it is like when Jim does, a green mask overlay shows up but it doesn’t allow any pixels through. If I click the eye so I don’t see the base layer i just have a transparent layer. Hoping for an answer, because this method looks easier then my current method adjusting values in CMYK and going back to rbg, for a quick fix, especially for multi people photos.
December 15th, 2011 at 7:48 am
The black layer doesn’t show up until you turn it on (on a PC, alt-click Mac cmd-click, the black layer – just the little square bit in the balance layer, not the layer itself). It is highlighted in the image above. Worked fine for me in CS4.