Re: filmscanners: negative and skin tones

[Jim Sharp <jsharp@illicom.net>]

Maris and Mikael

These CMYK values for facial skin tones are very useful.  

I have been struggling with some of my first scans trying to get the
skin tones to look right. Of course, in these photographs there aren't
even any good areas of black or white to help set those points. 

By adjusting the color to give me roughly the values you have both
mentioned, then further adjusting from there, my scans look
*substantially* better. Not surprisingly, all the colors look much more
normal. I know this is in a way a backward approach to color adjustment,
but with these scans the skin tones are what matter to me.

Thanks for the shortcut to at least get me to some baseline.

--
Jim


"Maris V. Lidaka, Sr." wrote:
> 
> VueScan is very interesting and useful to the subscribers on this group, and
> the program is somewhat opaque resulting in the many discussions of what
> appear to be insignificant details and changes in the different versions.  I
> would venture to say that Vuescan is the primary scanning program used
> though I have no statistics on which to base that.
> 
> Concerning the CMYK values for skintones, your guidelines appear to be more
> or less correct.  I have found Dan Margulis's guidelines to be a bit better
> and empirically more accurate.  He maintains that, for Caucasians, cyan
> should be about 1/5 to 1/3 of magenta (Professional Photoshop 5) rather than
> 1/2 as you suggest.
> 
> Another problem that comes to mind is that scanners export the image in RGB
> and desktop printers (without exceptions that I am aware of) require RGB
> input, performing the RGB-CMYK conversion internally.  As there is loss in
> color in the RGB-CMYK conversion and the subsequent CMYK-RGB re-conversion
> many try to avoid having to color-correct in CMYK despite the benefits of
> the black channel.
> 
> Maris
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mikael Risedal" <risedal@hotmail.com>
> To: <filmscanners@halftone.co.uk>
> Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2001 11:24 AM
> Subject: filmscanners: negative and skin tones
> 
> | To the scanner group.
> |
> | As a photographer Im "little bit tired "of reading  about  ( VueScan  nr
> | xxxx ) and i hoped  to learn something from  other people in the group,
> who
> | can be  more interesting and useful.
> |
> | Therefor i begin with a small tip:
> | To some of you who all ready know it- come with a  another tip !
> |
> | Scanning negative film and skin tones are sometimes a tuff job. You have
> | nothing to compare against,  (as with a slide.)
> | Faces  and skin tones become often to red in printing,  A good rule is to
> | measure the face skin tone in a CMYK profile known for printing purpose.
> | (do it in Photoshop 5.0  6.0)
> | If you make corrections and have
> | C  about half of  magenta
> | M  less then Yellow
> | Y   more then magenta + 5-10 %
> | K   -
> | This figures give you a more natural skin tone in printing , and the red
> and
> | ugly are goon.
> |
> | Another good rule  to know is that
> | Grey in CMYK are about  C= 32  M=20 Y0=20
> | You can  often estimate something in the picture who are grey.
> |
> | Mikael Risedal
> | Photographer
> | Lund
> | Sweden