Tutorial: Skin tones

Sooooo many things go into getting the skin tones correct.

1. Your camera's white balance:

You can have this set to auto, one of the presets, or a custom white balance. Honestly I keep my white balance on auto :)

2. Your camera's metering mode:

I choose to spot meter. The way you spot meter is to focus with your brackets on the brightest part of the subjects cheek *this is what works for me* press your shutter half way so that you will have the correct exposure on your camera's exposure meter.

Once you have your in-camera meter visible bring it to the center

Then here is the trick OVER-EXPOSE yes take it closer to the + just a tad though.

+...........0............-

*

To overexpose you want it to look like this:

+..........0..........-

**  

Canon is opposite of Nikon, so just make sure that your meter is closer to the +

That is for the in-camera.

You can also use a grey card to help with your correct colors as part of setting your custom white balance.

For post-processing
Remembering the color wheel will help to adjust the colors using color balance in PS and hue/saturation in PSE.

I also just recently found out on flickr of another awesome way to add a boost without throwing your colors off. Using a gradient map have your colors at #503c2d, and #b6cad1

*you will have to search on your own to fully understand gradient maps*

and set it to soft light blend mode.

I also have a custom levels adjustment that I love, which I used my grey card to test the lights for my studio.