SKIN TONES & COLOR CORRECTION- PROBLEMS SOLVED!

There is a thread "Help with skin tones". I posted the following reply and I kept getting a message "No title.." although there was a title-??  In any event here's my post started in a new thread. 

I consider myself fortunate in that long before the days of digital photography; I was well versed in traditional analog color printing.  When I opened up PhotoShop for the very first time, I had absloutley no problems in quickly arriving at good skin tones and general color balance- I could do that in seconds.  Here’s how and why:

There are many principles of old fashioned color printing and that can be exactly applied to digital printing and work for me each and every time.

•   Negatives and files- Good negatives make good prints as do clean files.  Your white balance is indeed very important just as proper color temperature matching with the light source is required with film.  In digital work, when massive post productions are needed to correct for bad white balance differentials, it becomes harder to achieve normal color balances in your prints.  The same goes for exposure and density issues.
•   In the olden days, enlargers and video analyzers as well as non-visual color analyzers had to be properly calibrated to track with each other.  Your screen, printers and outside labs all have to be precisely or consistent color balance will be very difficult to achieve if at all. You must start off with a clean slate or you will be chasing your color balance around the computer forever.
•   A good test card is the Mac Beth Color Checker- it has a wide range of different color patches as well as black, 18% gray and white.
•   You will need a good grounding in the color wheel this is essential for understanding how to go about color correcting any image.  For instance- if an image is too green, you need to work with the magenta/green slide switch in your PhotoShop program.  If the image is too blue you work with the blue/yellow channel and if the image is too cyan you use the cyan/red control.  If there is still some off color hew or tint in you image you may have to tweak your correction.  If your image is still a bit blue after a red/cyan correction that means the bad color in the original image was in fact cyan-blue, not just cyan.  A blue/yellow correction will fix that.  With analog printing, that would have been called a combination correction.
•   The problem of endless time being spent in post production color correction stems from lack of some of this old fashioned color theory.  When one start sliding the switches all over the place without some knowledge of where to begin, one can just about go insane in trying to chase the color all over the place and going from one extreme to another.
•   Another tip is to firstly normalize the density (darkness/lightness) and contrast before starting to correct the color.  If the density and contrast are not right the colors will again shift when density and contrast adjustments are made after the fact and more going back and forth and chasing will occur. You still may want to go back a tweak think before you make prints or make finite adjustments after seeing your first print, but al least you will be well into the ballpark at that point. 
•   I have retrieved my old color correction filter guides from the mothballs.  Sometimes theses are handy- you view the screen through the filters and you can see what directions you corrections should be going in.  The technique is to flick the filters quickly in and out in front of you eyes so that you don’t get used to bad color.  After a while you brain cuts in and begins to compensate for the off colors- sounds funny but it’s true.   
•   Remember, inconsistent files are the worst enemy of fast and efficient work flow so try to do as many corrections in the camera s as possible.
•   When you are ready to edit you images, place all of you flash exposures together, all of you daylight images together and bring all of you available light, low light or problematic images together.  If you are a clean shooter, the images made under similar conditions should not require radical corrections from one to the other.  Shots which were difficult to make under poor lighting, images with noise or serious exposure problems should be ganged together and handled slowly but surely after the bulk of the images are processed. Going in and out of various modes and having to use different or extreme actions will slow down production to a snails pace. 
•   Another tip to speed up color correction is “jump don’t creep”. That means when you go for a specific correction it is better to exceed the correct and rock it in by going slowly back and fourth until you achieve the balance you want.  If you creep in one direction, it is easier to make a mistake.
Sooo- what is correct balance?  Within certain standards, some of this is subjective.  In weddings and portraiture, most photographers prefer a slightly warmer skin tome- others prefer something more neutral. In wedding work we want to have a warm saturated skin tone as well as clean whites in the gowns and clean blacks in the black suits or tuxedos.  Too much red in an image may not affect the skin tones all that much but that can begin to neutralize the greens in the grass and foliage in an outdoor setting causing the to look gray or dead. There are cases like this where a gray card of a color chart may NOT be of too much help and you have to arrive at a good compromise by eye.

I hope this helps!   Ed
   

Thanks Ed!