# How is "skin color eye-dropper" for concept?



## New Daddy (Jun 2, 2012)

Perhaps the single most important reason for adjusting white balance is to remove color cast on skin. But various white balance tools are geared towards fixing the white color, which is fine. But when the frame has mixed lighting and there is no patch of white color near the subject's skin, the white balance eye-dropper is not much of help.  If you are in that kind of situation, the eye-dropper is of little value and you're reduced to dealing with the color temperature/green-magenta slider.

So, I was thinking, why not a "skin color eye-dropper"?  If the goal is achieving a naturally looking skin color, why take the indirect route of referencing a white area in the frame rather than the subject's skin color? As the name suggests, what it will do is change the white balance so that the dropper-selected area will have natural skin color. Yes,  everyone's skin color is different, so LR must provide several different skin color references for the user to choose. (This would be far more useful that using a WB eye-dropper when the patch of white in the frame was exposed to a different color cast than the subject's skin.)  Better yet, it can be made to match the skin color of the subject in a different photo, in which the white balance has already been correctly adjusted.

How is this for concept? Is there a third-party plug-in that does this already?


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## erro (Jun 2, 2012)

So what skin color(s) should it attempt to produce? A pale swede in the winter? Or a sunburnt italian? Or a guy from japan? Or an woman from Botzwana? Or....? A drop-down list with hundreds of different skin colors?

Matching color between photos though is another thing


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## New Daddy (Jun 2, 2012)

erro said:


> So what skin color(s) should it attempt to produce? A pale swede in the winter? Or a sunburnt italian? Or a guy from japan? Or an woman from Botzwana? Or....? A drop-down list with hundreds of different skin colors?



That's why I suggested that a "skin color eye-dropper" should provide several references, from pale to dark. From there, the user can darken or lighten, along the axis of a "skin color". It'd be far better than choosing a white area as the starting point and adjust from there so the skin would look natural, unless the lighting was uniform throughout the frame or the white area was very close to the subject's skin (as if the subject was holding a Colorchecker).


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## Jimmsp (Jun 2, 2012)

One of the other RAW converters that I use has exactly what you are looking for. And you can create reference points for future use. These have been very helpful for me as I often shoot my grand children in a variety of lighting conditions. So I have created a number of reference points for them (eg, face, neck, arm) in well controlled lighting and using grey card.


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## New Daddy (Jun 2, 2012)

Jimmsp said:


> One of the other RAW converters that I use has exactly what you are looking for. And you can create reference points for future use. These have been very helpful for me as I often shoot my grand children in a variety of lighting conditions. So I have created a number of reference points for them (eg, face, neck, arm) in well controlled lighting and using grey card.



Which converter is it?


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## Jimmsp (Jun 2, 2012)

I use Capture One Pro most of the time. It has its pluses and minuses relative to Lightroom 4.


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## Victoria Bampton (Jun 2, 2012)

Yeah, I thought it was Capture One that had that, and I could see a use for it.  The other thing I've often wished for, in a vaguely related stream of thought, is multiple clipboards, where you could keep 4 or 5 different white balance settings, for the occasions when you're swapping cameras and lighting.


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## Jimmsp (Jun 2, 2012)

That could prove useful as well. I can't always (most of the time?) get a grey card in the right place at the right time.
Shooting the kids at school proves to be my toughest environment,  as the lighting from room to room changes, and even within the same room.
Last year they were on a stage where the light up front was very different from that in the rear. That's when I appreciate the wb adjustment brush.


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## New Daddy (Jun 3, 2012)

Jimmsp said:


> I use Capture One Pro most of the time. It has its pluses and minuses relative to Lightroom 4.



Is it possible to use Capture One Pro to calibrate white balance but embed the adjustment into the metadata, so you can import the files into LR and finish rest of the conversion process in LR?


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## Denis de Gannes (Jun 3, 2012)

Not on the cards, once you start cooking the raw data with one software you cannot mix and match. They do not read what each others processes.


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## Jimmsp (Jun 3, 2012)

The only thing that you can do is to process it as far as you want in CO, save it as a Tiff, and finish the Tiff in Lightroom. I have actually done that a few times.


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