Skin tones on a hazy day: phantom like!

[Gustaftoni]

Hello to everybody!


I wanted to discuss a particular condition I dealt with yesterday. It was a hazy and sunny day, time was about 5.00 PM (took my shoots partly in the sun, partly in the shade, in a park). All the pictures show good color balance, but very pale skin tones. For sure the diffused light helped in avoiding shadows on faces, but color saturation is a bit low and skin remains "whiteish" even raising it. Changing the color balance gives acceptable skin tones, but returns a hue on anything else (almost brown hair on fair people). I don't uderstand why the skin tones are so strange coimpared to the rest. What can I do to avoid this the next time? I'm quite sure a CPL would have helped, but I forgot it at home, so I couldn't try.


Thank you in advance for your contributions!


GT

[Colin500]

With outdoor portraits in the shade, a gold reflector to bring in a bit of sunlight with some colour often works fine for me

[Sean Setters]

....or an off-camera flash with a warm CTO or CTS gel.


(Come on, you had to know it was coming!)

[bouwy]

(Come on, you had to know it was coming!)
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LOL

[Gustaftoni]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts!


Unfortunately I was on my own (no one to hold the reflector) and subjects where moving (no off camera flash would have been a viable choice). I didn

[Daniel Browning]

Pics or it didn

[rzFoto]

If the color casting is marginal, you should be able to correct it with good results using Curves. Take a color sample on the face skin (not too dark or too bright) using eyedropper (Shift + click), in the Info tap change the just sampled color to CYMK. Turn on Curves, adjust the Red and Blue channels at the sampled brightness (click the sampled area to get the color brightness reading). For Pale female, use the foloowing ratios:


C: between 1/3 and 1/5 of

[JustinThyme]

I have seem this time and again. My bet is on underexposing the image and losing color and detail in an attempt to recover in post procees. Are the images loosing "POP" too appearing with a grayish cast an looking flat? Underexposing is one of the most common mistakes involving shooting outdoors in full sun. If you are using auto anything without exposure compensation you cant pretty much count on it.


Pics of the problem situations do help in finding the culprit. A picture really is worth a thousand words or more in some instances. If you nail the exposure up front post process correction is not necessary.[]