fbpx
Education Field Instructional

How to Get Film-like Warm Skin Tones With Daylight White Balance

Chris Gampat
No Comments
09/15/2017
2 Mins read
Chris Gampat the Phoblographer Capture One Skin Tone edited images8001-160s1.428 mm f-1.4

Last Updated on 09/16/2017 by Chris Gampat

One of the reasons I use specific white balances like Daylight when shooting photos is because it tends to take the guesswork out of editing and colors. Daylight white balance is balanced to be fairly warm and to counteract the already very cool light that daylight is. Though many times there are situations where you’d rather have warm skin tones in the scene. For the most part, what people tend to do is just work with the white balance to make the skin warmer but then in the process just make the whole scene warmer.

This happens a whole lot when working during the blue hour, in overcast weather etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nLt1xqAeeY&feature=youtu.be

So then the question becomes how exactly do you get those skin tones right? The answer: it’s the hues and saturation.

Part of making the skin tones and your subject stand out more from the scene has to do with working with the individual color channels in the scene. Working with the hues makes the tones get tinted, warmer, cooler, etc depending on the direction you go in. But also changing things like the luminance can make skin and a subject stand out more from a scene.

Edited photo
Unedited

The idea behind this stems from the teachings of famous portrait photographers; and in this case we’re going to take Steve McCurry. Steve takes portraits based on three things: the skin tones, the background and the wardrobe. He tries to ensure they don’t blend into one another and instead that they stand out from one another. And photographers for years have been trying to do that as well.

So in this tutorial, what I ended up doing was working with the skin tones and the overall tones of the scene to make Erwin stand out more. The main colors here are purple, orange and blue. They all tend to affect one another in some way so adjusting each to get to the right point is all that you need to do.

For even more tutorials, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

capture one colors cool daylight editing portraiture skin tones steve mccurry Warm Skin Tones white balance
Shares
Written by

Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
');
You might also like