Rhonda Strange Animal Week 3

[mikemeister_admin]

In this one, I got the color looking somewhat good to my eye, and set a neutral, shadow and highlight.  By only modifying the lightness and the ends of the curve in a and b, I could not get the other areas to not have a cast.  Any suggestions?

Why did you want us to unlock the pin?  Were we to then adjust the other parts of the image and bring the skin pin back?  I never did this because I wondered why it would work to start over without the pin, when the skin pin made such a positive impact.

This is one strange looking animal!  Any idea what it is?

[ggroess]

This fine little guy is a Proboscis monkey.
And you have done a fine job of getting him to look good..

Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Thanks, Greg.  Having heightened curiosity is sometime a curse, but I am curious about the strategy of unlocking the pin once you've set it. 

I've also noticed that, say the #1 skin pins doesnt' always  look the same, depending on the background.  Back on my Fruit window, I tried several skin pins on the man in the background, but they came out completely different.  The pin seems take into account the color of the surface that it is placed upon, and thus is relative?  I don't quite understand this, if the skin numbers seem to be absolute when you read them as numbers.  Can you explain a bit of "skin pin theory?" 

Thanks so much for your patience!

[ggroess]

One thing I have learned about the skin pins and I make mention of it in the Skin tones work flow; is that the better the overall the image is when you apply a skin tone pin the better the skin pin works.  It is always better to start from a reasonable correction before applying the skin tone pins.

I found that I would get wild swings in the pinning as well.  This was because the sample under the pin may be a pixel that is shifted out of skin tones range and when you apply the pin; the curves do not really know where they should be; they only know where you told them to go. This forces all colors in the image to shift as well.  If you hit a blue pixel and it should have been a reasonable tone you can really mess up all the color.

Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Thanks!  That makes sense.