Lessons

Lesson Info

Skin Essentials: White Balance

So I've had a lot of experience in photographing skin over the last few years. I've been in new york city for five years, shooting for shooting fashion photography, but I've shot portraits for the last 13 years and I said I'm still young, but like I've been shooting fortunes for a very long time. Um, and so this is just to give you an idea of the type of work that I do now a days because all the pictures that I'm going to show you in this presentation are not retouched today at all, because the whole point is you got to see what the skin really looks like. I haven't touched it up. I haven't done anything fancy it is how the skin looks. So let me show you though, what my images end up looking like, kind of what the end product is. So I'm photographing things like foundation and eye makeup advertisements on. I'm photographing a lot of different skin tones. Maybe they're very, very pale. Maybe they have warm skin tones. For example, I'm photographing something that's supposed to look wet ...

and do we, but not oily. So have those kind of experiences or I'm photographing things that are supposed to be kind of natural and lush or in photographing very, very dark skin tones. And I actually photographed a lot of dark skin tones. A lot of my clients here in the US are african american professional athletes are photograph a lot of beauty products for darker skin tone and so I've had to learn and trust me, I didn't know how to photograph different skin tones. Starting off, I made a lot of mistakes and then figured out along the way. So I'm hoping to save you guys a little bit of time. And I've had to do things like learn how to retouch freckles without making them go away. That was a huge one that I struggled with when I had a portrait business because I had all these cute kids with freckles and then I go to retouch and they had no more freckles and I'm photographing editorial looks and I'm trying to make the skin glow or make it look metallic or make it look lush. And so I have a wide range of different images that if you look at all these pretty much they're all based on skin. Skin is what makes these photos of course the jewelry and of course for photographing beautiful people. But it's that glowing skin, that perfection that really makes the image. So that's what we're going to talk about these next few days, is how to get beautiful beautiful skin. And there are so many different things that go into it. There's lighting, there is the angle of light, the quality of light, your white balance, your retouching. So let's jump into it and I'll give you an idea of what we're going to talk about. So ruining skin. There are a lot of things that can ruin skin and the three main categories that we're going to take a look at the first one is color wrong. Color can ruin skin if it has a different color shift or the white balance is wrong or if it's too saturated or if it's too dull, like all of that can mess up skin. The next one is texture. If the skin is overly smooth with retouching, well, that's a way to mess up skin. But then if it's too harsh, if there's too much texture, if it really is distracting from your subject, That's another thing that can distract you. And of course tone, you want that person to look the skin tone that they are. Don't want to be too late. Don't want to be too dark unless you're going for creative purposes. So here you go, the top 10 things that will definitely ruin skin and I'm going to read through them real quick and then basically just get started. So we do have white balance. I was very, very reluctant as a portrait photographer to do anything other than use white balance presets as a fashion photographer. I realized that yeah, I have to do more. And so hopefully I'll be able to impart that to you so that you're going to do a lot more with white balance whether you're photographing for portraits or beauty or weddings, We're gonna get into that. We have mixed lighting can ruin skin. Also colour contamination. I'll explain what that means. Also, if you have your camera and computer set up wrong, that will actually ruin what the skin tones look like. # five is going to be color management. So we're going to get into that. I'm going to try to keep it nice and simple without making your heads explode because I know that color management always stressed me out. We're gonna talk about how exposure could ruin skin, about how we can get good exposure and talk about the quality of light, the direction of lights, makeup and retouching. So that's today. All right. So let's get started with white balance. Alright, so white balance, the most important thing that you should definitely know is that auto is usually your enemy because here's here's the problem with auto. White balance. What auto white balance is trying to do is neutralize the scene. If you're going to just try to do something minimal, like at least not be an auto, then you're going to pick a white balance preset. And so that's looking at things like the daylight preset or the flash preset in your camera. You can pick what lighting situation you think you're in. It's better than nothing if you have no other solution. Okay, But then better than that would be shooting a great card, a color checker or custom white balance. So let me jump in and explain exactly what that means because this always overwhelms me. Why would I want a color checker over a great card. Well, let me show you what you would need. All right, great card is purely for this. If you photograph a great card, this target what you have are all neutral tones. Okay, so when you go ahead and look at if you've used the color sampler in Photoshop, when you go ahead and you mouth over these different tones, all the numbers for RGB should be the same, which means that it's neutral. There's no color cast when everything is equal, there is no color, it's going to be gray, white or black. So when you photograph a great card, What it is great for is in post in Photoshop in light room. What you can do is you can set the white balance. So for example in light room you have the white balance picker and I'll be showing you how to do this on day three. But I could go ahead, take my white balance picker and click on the gray. And what it does is it says, okay, so I know she's telling me that all the numbers, the red, green and blue should all be the same. And if it's not, it will shift it will shift the colors in your picture so that it is neutral. So that's good. That's a good place to start and I can show you how it makes a drastic difference gives you a neutral point in your scene. The most important part is that helps eliminate guessing. So you're not trying to figure out because I'm not I don't know about you. I'm not good at looking at skin tones and saying, is that too blue? Like my brain doesn't quite work that way. I need something a little bit more systematic. What you want to look at here is on the picture in the picture on the left. This is what we were able to get with just auto just pointing the camera and having that great card there. So then in post I went over into light room with my white balanced picker. I picked that gray which is saying I want this to be neutralized and then it shifted and it warms it up a little bit and it gives you more accurate to what her skin actually looks like. Maybe the first picture doesn't look that bad, but that's not actually what her skin tone looks like and she's gonna have a lot more warmth and a lot more vibrance when I use the great card. Okay, but let's take it a little bit step further. Kind of if you want to get a little bit fancier, a little bit more advanced. This is something called a color checker or color chart. Um It was called Macbeth chart. There's a lot of different names, what it's going to give you is a full range of colors and then also from white, two black. So I'll do the same thing when I'm shooting in the studio or a shooting on location. I just have an assistant pop their hand in, I take a picture and so what that's going to allow me to do is set the white balance. One of the reasons that if you aren't using a workflow management program like light room or aperture or capture 1. 1 of the reasons that you kind of have to is this right here and creative life has a lot of great classes to get you familiar with how a light room an aperture might work. I believe you have an aperture class coming up soon. But the reason why is what I can do is in the one picture where I'm holding that color checker, the subjects holding the color checker. I grabbed my white balance dropper and I select a neutral palette and then it corrects that image. But the reason that it's so great is I can then apply that change to every other image in that entire set that had that white balance or that had that color temperature. So if I'm photographing in my studio with the beauty dish, it's basic setup, I take one picture of that color checker. I can make one change in light room and the color will be perfect the whole time. Um First of all you have these tones up here on the top and then what they're going to let you do is they look gray and they kind of are but they're gray. This is neutral and then each one progressively gets a little bit more blue. Okay, so if we think about, I mean they're getting colder. So if I go ahead and I select this and say this is supposed to be neutral and I click on it, it says okay well there's blue there so I need to warm this up in order to neutralize it. Well then the whole picture warms up. So what this is meant for is if you're looking at your image and you take your neutral white balance adjustment and the picture just looks cool. Like those skin tones are not as warm as you intended. You can go ahead and keep adding just a little bit of warmth as you click to the right. So it's a little bit subjective which of course sometimes skin tones are sometimes we want them to look a little bit warmer and more lively than they were in reality. A couple of things that you want to be aware of is when the subject is holding this, can I have the color checker please? When the subject is holding this? Thank you john perfect. Um it does seem to be pointing towards the main light source because let's say that there's a tungsten lamp right next to me over here and the subjects holding it like this but it's not really hitting their face. It's going to read that light so you do want it front and center towards the main light hitting your subject. The next thing to be very careful of is these are actually pigments like swatches of paint color, which means if you're subject goes like this, the oils and their finger changes the color, which means your white balance will be totally off. That's just how it's me. And the reason it's made like that is so that it's not a reflective surface and it's also truer color tones than printing. So what you want them to do is they do need to hold the side of the color checker and I usually just have them hold it like this and then the last part to be aware of is you want to make sure that the people, there's little heads of people are facing right side up because when you're using the plug in that helps it to identify the color checker chart more easily. So just a couple of things. But I like this one because it is very lightweight, it's very small. I keep it in my bag and then you just in a lighting situation, you pop it out there, grab a quick shot. It's not that much effort because consider now if you didn't do it and you have to buy hand color correct every image, it's definitely worth the effort. It doesn't have to be exactly when that subjects, they're just pop it out there and grab a quick shot, I have that other one. Great. Another one and I can actually switch with you momentarily. Another version. This one is made by data color. It's going to be larger. It gives you a little bit more ability for someone to hold on to it. But another reason this is nice actually has amount on the bottom so you can put it on different like a light stand, have it mounted there so you could actually just pop it out in front of your subject instead of them having to hold it. All right. So the first one is the skin tone before the color checker. The second one is the skin tone after the color checker. Now in this image, in this particular example we don't have any bright colors so you won't see the color shift but it is definitely much better. Skin tones significantly improved because if you look at the first photo I think she looks kind of bluish green whereas in the second she's much much warmer. It's going to be actually what her skin tone looks like this. This young woman, she had like this beautiful warm skin and I want to show that. So I told you about these custom profiles. These are the two companies I just mentioned in case you didn't catch me saying that it's the x ray passport color checker and there's a data color spider checker was the name of that second bigger one that I was holding. Their either system will work great for getting good white balance about those. Okay, the next thing that I wanted to talk about is something that you may have heard of called an expo disk. So an expo desk is a way of creating custom white balance. Thank you. And I will double this in a minute. Okay, So here's how an expo disk works in any lighting situation. What you're going to do is you're going to take a picture with your camera of the light that is hitting your subject. So, for example, if I'm the subject that I'm sitting here in the chair, the light that is hitting me is going to be that light mostly. Okay, so I can take a picture of that light source and I don't know if you can see this. You're a nice guy just to go over All right, let's hold this like that. Okay, if you take a look at it, see all those little like orbs on those little diodes in there. What it actually does is it catches the light from every different direction and so it will pick up if there's a little bit of blue from this direction, it's going to pick up everything that's hitting your light source or hitting your subject. So here's what I do. You take a picture with this on the front of your camera and it looks gray. It doesn't actually like I was really confused when I first saw it. It's a picture of nothing. It is a great frame, but then what you do is you tell your camera this needs to be neutral, that's what you're doing. You're saying, okay camera, this is all the light in the scene. It's supposed to be neutral. It's probably not. Please create a custom white balance based on this light. And so it will do that same thing as we were talking about with the color checker. When you take your little white balance eyedropper and say this is supposed to be neutral. Get rid of any of the colors that are in this neutral swatch. Do the exact same thing so I can show you what that actually ends up looking like. Okay, so this is what she looked like before using the expo disk. This is just using my auto, it's not, you know, not great, not terrible. So then I come over behind her. Look, I come over behind her here and I put the expo disk, you can see it on the front of my lens and they make different um they make different sizes depending on the size of your lens. And I point it back at the strobe but I'm not taking a picture of the modern light. My strobe has to fire because the light that's going to be lighting my subject isn't going to be tungsten like the modeling light would be, it's going to be the light from the strobe. So point it right back at the light. I take a picture and I get a custom white balance that's going to give me a much warmer, like really glowing skin tone. It's much much more improved. And what's funny is what I actually got as a picture with this to me and I'm looking at it and saying, well what is that? It looks great to all of us, but it's not, it's actually picking up any of the different tones in your light source. So when I set it as a custom white balance, it will correct for skin tones.