GETTING SKIN TONES RIGHT
On 12/15/12 10:48, Gracia M. Littauer wrote:
I'm trying to print a scanned 8 X 10 professional photo of an African-American
family (fiends) who have rich tones of very dark milk chocolate to middle dark
brown.
Printing pictures of fiends can get you into big trouble :-)
I know black skin tones are either red or yellow. I have been playing with
color balance, but the results are very dull and flat.
Any suggestions before frustration & over eating kill me ;^).
--
Gracia in Cooleemee, NC- on Zenwalk 6.2
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mynameistaken/
http://www.youtube.com/bellalight
Cogito, ergo sum
I'm out of my league here, but are you working with a color-corrected monitor
and do you have a color profile for your printer? That's probably your starting
point if you actually want to get them right. You will also need some kind of
white / grey / black reference from the scanned image, unless it is known to be
corrected to something standard like sRGB already.
In order to have any sane approach to the problem, you need to have the colors
on your monitor ("what you see") print in the same colors on the printer ("what
you get"), and the color profiles properly set up make that happen. At that
point you can correct the image so it looks the way it "should" be, to your eye
or to some white / grey reference point, and then it will print ok.
Unless the problem is not the translation from the display to the paper,
but rather getting it to look right on the display in the first place.
In which case I haven't a clue.
But here's a thought: If you can find another image with the skin tone you like,
bring both images up in gimp. Display the reference image at 100% and pick an
area where the skin is the color you want. Use the pointer tool
(windows / dockable dialogs / pointer)
and hover over a pixel of the appropriate color and write down the rgb values.
Then go to the main image, find the skin area where you want the color to match,
and note those rgb values. Then use the curves tool to bring them into
agreement the way you would to do a white balance.
Gary
