QUICKLY Fix Skin Tones in Photoshop! POWERFUL Photoshop Curves Adjustment Hack

[Music] hi welcome back to the photoshoptrainingchannel.com I'm mrs. Ramirez in this video I'm going to show you how to fix skin tones in Photoshop we will use a powerful curves adjustment hack they will allow you to click once and fix skin tones you will have to fine-tune the adjustment but Photoshop will do most of the hard work you will also learn how the eyedropper tools work with the curves adjustment in how you can use them to apply interesting effects or skintone Corrections this video has a ton of useful tips and tricks in one freebie so make sure that you stick around to the very end ok let's get started this is the portrait that we're going to work with and as you can see the skin tones are not looking very good and I'm gonna start by showing you a quick tip if you go into window and info and you hover over an image you will see the RGB values change as I hover over the pixels and one thing that I want you to look at and understand is how these numbers relate to skin tones red green and blue usually if you want to have natural-looking skin tones you need the red to be higher than the green which in this case is not and the green higher than the blue whatever the value is they just have to be higher and usually that would give you good skin tones in this case they are not so we know that we need to make an adjustment and what I'm going to show you is a technique with the curves adjustment layer that will allow you to fix this skin tone issues with just one click but before we do that we need to get ourselves organized it's really important to be organized when you work in Photoshop that way you have a much easier time when you're retouching and working with multiple layers so the first thing that I'll do is create a group by clicking on the new group icon and I'll just call it retouch then I'm going to click on the portrait layer and go into the quick selection tool and I'll just make a selection around the areas that I want my curves adjustment layer to effect basically his skin tones and I'll include his hair so I'm going to click and drag and make a selection around his face ears neck anything that I want that adjustment layer to effect if you make a mistake like I did here and didn't select that part of the head just keep clicking and dragging if you selected an area that you didn't intend to select hold alt on windows option on the Mac and click and drag to deselect you don't need to worry about all the fine details with the selection at this moment just make sure that you have a good enough selection and you can always come back and make your refinements at the end that's the way I recommend working then with the selection active click on the group and then click on the new layer mask icon to create a mask based on the selection so now if we create a curves adjustment layer while we have the group selected it will appear inside of the group and any adjustments I make to that adjustment layer will only affect the contents of that mask in the reason that we applied the mask to the group and not the layer mask is so that we can have multiple adjustment layers controlled by the same mask I'm going to delete this hue and saturation adjustment layer because we don't need it and we're just going to work with the curves adjustment layer and do not confuse you I'm going to delete the layer mask by right-clicking and selecting delete layer mask so we're just gonna work with this curves adjustment layer I'm gonna hover in between the panels and I'm gonna drag down so that we can see the entire panel and we're gonna talk about the eyedropper tools I'm going to explain what they do so that you better understand the process that we're going to use to make that skin adjustment let's start at the top with the black point eyedropper when you select that eyedropper you can click on any area of the image and that will become black for example if I click on this part of his hair notice how that becomes black and it makes the rest of the image darker of course that's setting the darkest point of the image basically I'm telling Photoshop that this area that I clicked on will be the darkest point of the image so anything darker than that will be black and we have the opposite of that we have the white point with this eyedropper here so if I select the white point eyedropper and click on an area like maybe his skin here that'll become the brightest point of the image and I can continue clicking on different areas to see how it changes the image so if I click on the highlight the highlight now is the brightest point of the image and you get the result that you see there then we have the great point eyedropper which allows you to neutralize an image by clicking on something that should be a neutral gray notice that when I click on here Photoshop will try to neutralize the grace which changes the color of the skin tones so that is just the basic explanation about what these tools do and what we're going to do is we're going to use these tools to apply custom colors I'm going to click on the reset button to reset the curves adjustment layer then I'm going to double click on the black point eyedropper and that brings up the color picker and if I select a dark red and press ok Photoshop will ask me if that's going to become the new default color I'm going to say no I just want to use it once and I'll click on that same spot of his hair that I did earlier in that dark red will become the darkest color of the image I'll now double click on the white point eyedropper and I'll select a light green press ok and tell Photoshop that I do not want to make these my default colors and I'll click on the highlights now the brightest points are light green and something very important to note in the curves adjustment layer is that I've changed the black point in white point of all the RGB channels represented by red green and blue lines that you see there I can control them individually by going into each individual Channel but I mean the RGB composite so I can see them all the point is is that I can use a great point eyedropper and now I neutralized the image and obviously the colors change but something very very important to note is that the black and white points did not change just the mid-tones to try to neutralize that image so if I double click on the gray point eyedropper you can see that we're trying to neutralize it to a 50% gray obviously but I can change that to a different color we'll try this magenta color press ok and if I click here notice how now it tries to neutralize the image with that color so that's the principles that we're going to use to fix the color tones of the portrait just with one click so what I'm going to do is reset the curves adjustment layer and all that we need to do is tell Photoshop what color the skin tones should be and to do so you can simply double click on the gray point hi dropper and select the skin tone if you don't have a skin tone handy do not worry I created a cc library a Creative Cloud library that has all these different skin tones that you can use I'm gonna place a link down below in the description where you can actually download these onto your Creative Cloud account and this is what the page looks like these are the skin tones that I saved and if you're logged into your Creative Cloud account you will see a Save button here when you click on it they will be added to your Creative Cloud account and you can use them in Photoshop if you don't have Photoshop cc then don't worry about it simply take a screenshot import it into Photoshop and use the eyedropper tool to select the skin tone that you want to use once you have them in your Creative Cloud library this is what they would look like and all you need to do is simply click on any one of these skin tones for example I'll click on this one skin tone number five once and it applies it to my foreground color if I were to double click on it it will bring up the color picker and I don't want to do that I don't want to change it so there it is and what I'm going to do now is on the curves adjustment layer make sure that the focus the white outline is on the curves not on the layer mask I don't have a layer mask but if I did the focus maybe in the layer mask so you have to make sure that these white outlines are around the curves thumbnail then go back into the properties panel for the curves adjustment layer and double click on the gray point eyedropper and select that skin tone foreground color impress okay of course we do not want to make a default and in the options bar you want to make sure that you have sample size set to something bigger than point sample I have it set to 11 by 11 average and that will work for me this simply means that when you click on a pixel you won't actually sample the pixel that you clicked on you will instead sample a square that's 11 pixels by 11 pixels and you will get an average of those colors and all we're gonna do now is simply click on a skin tone and see what happens and there you go with one click we change the skin if you're unhappy with your results you can click on another area I'll stick with this obviously this is not 100% perfect we do want to make some adjustments first of all I don't want the skintone color to affect his eyes I'll enable a layer mask select the brush tool make sure that Black is my foreground color and paint with black over his eyes remember that you can use the left and right bracket keys on the keyboard to reduce or increase the size of the brush as you paint to be frank with you I do want a little bit of that effect that the curves adjustment layer is applying so that I can remove just a bit of that color cast so I'll bring back the effect at 50% and let me show you a cold trick with the fade command I'll start by making my brush a little bit larger by tapping on the right bracket key on the keyboard set my foreground color to white to reveal and I'm going to paint over to reveal the effect once again and the reason that I did that was so that I can go into the Edit menu and under fade brush tool I can fade that effect in the fade command allows me to reduce the opacity of the last thing that I did in this case was to paint with white over his eyes so now I can control how intense I want that adjustment to be in this case I'll set the opacity to 50% and press ok and what I'm gonna do now is with the curves adjustment layer I can do several things for example I can reduce the opacity so I can bring the opacity down to zero and increase it accordingly until I get the skin tones that I like also I would like to point out one other thing I'm going to increase the opacity to 100% go back into my libraries panel and I'm going to select one of these skin tones and also like the darkest one so you can see something I want to select this skin tone number ten I'm gonna go back into the properties panel click on the curves adjustment layer make sure that the focus the white outline is on the curves thumbnail and double click on the gray point and select that new darker skin tone I'm gonna press ok and I'm going to press no I don't want these to be my default colors and I'm gonna click on the skin tone and once again and look at the difference is not any darker no matter where I click he doesn't get any darker if you remember that's because the gray point does not change though black or white point we're only changing the mid-tones so just because we select a darker skin tone doesn't mean that we're gonna make the image darker or brighter so to keep that in mind in a lot of cases using a darker skin tone works better because it reduces the saturation so we don't have to worry about the saturation too much so we can of course still reduce the opacity but in this case I don't think it's necessary and actually in this case I think that if we use something like color for a blending mode it might be a good thing so that's color and that's normal and the difference is that with color we're not using the luminosity that we created we're only using the luminosity of the background so we're using the original luminance values and we're letting the curves adjustment layer only take care of the color which means that is taking care of the hue and saturation of the skin tones and we can then create a second adjustment layer for example we can create a levels adjustment layer set the blending mode to luminosity so that we only affect the luminance values and we can use this layer to control the brightness of the skin tone so that's one of the reasons why I created a group with one layer mask so that this layer mask you control anything that we throw in there and in this case I don't necessarily want that strong effect if anything I may want to brighten the skin just a little bit and maybe not be so bright in some of the highlights obviously this is all subjective whatever you prefer whatever looks good to your eye and to the story that you're trying to tell with your image one other thing that you can do is maybe create a vibrance adjustment layer and you can control the saturation of the image vibrance is a smart way of saturating images it protects already saturated pixels and skin tones so it's great to use in portraits if you want to learn more about the difference between vibrance and saturation then check out this video it's a video where I discuss them both and their differences I'll place a link right below to the script but anyway you can see that just with this group I can control the entire adjustment so that's before and that's after and you can do all of this just basically with one click once you set the color on the gray point eyedropper just click on the skintone and you can select your skin tone from any other photo any color that you want or you can have access to these skin tones that I saved for you in a Creative Cloud library again the link is right below in the description also all I wanted to take a few moments to show you how to add a new color swatch to the skin tones cc library all you need to do is select the foreground color that you want to add to your library and simply click on this plus icon the add content icon and select foreground color when you do that the new foreground color will appear and you can double click on the name to rename it I don't really want it in my group so I'm just going to delete it I'm going to click and drag it into the trash icon and that goes away so you can keep adding as many colors as you want to your cc library and you're probably curious about the first thing that I talked about which is the RGB value so I'm gonna go back into the info panel and watch what happens when I hover over to a similar area the info panel will display two sets of values on the left the original values and on the right the values that are created with the adjustment layers that we applied in the group notice it now the red is higher than the green 134 over 106 and the green is higher than the blue 106 over 72 so again skin tones will always look better if the red is higher than the green and the green is higher than the blue and by the way let me know in the comments below what you think about these techniques if you like them then click on that like button now also if you're brand new to the Photoshop training channel then don't forget to click on that subscribe and notification buttons that way you're notified whenever I post a new tutorial and you don't miss any new Photoshop tips and tricks also if you enjoyed this video then don't forget to check out my tutorial on creating skin texture from scratch is one of my 90 second Photoshop tips I'll place a link to that video right bill the description thank you so much for watching and I will talk to you again in the next Photoshop tutorial

Channel: Photoshop Training Channel

Views: 108,701

Rating: 4.8955612 out of 5

Keywords: Fix Skin Tones in Photoshop, Fix Skin Tones with One Button in Photoshop, How to Color Correct Skin in Photoshop, Code to Perfect Skin Tones in Photoshop, Equalize Skin Tones in Photoshop, Get Amazing Skin Tones In Photoshop, skin retouching, color correction photoshop, photoshop color correction, photoshop curves, curves in photoshop, skin retouching photoshop tutorial, skin tone photoshop, jesus ramirez, jrfromptc, photoshop training channel, photoshop tutorial, ptcvids

Id: -2tgiZ3zn0I

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019