Is there anyone out there that has felt the same sting that I have regarding the 5D and overly red skin?
It's not too hard to fix in photoshop but Adobe Camera Raw just can't handle it.
Anybody using a raw converter other than ACR and getting great skin tones?
Please help; I'm about to jump off the roof.
I agree--skin tones were the reason I started using DPP instead of ACR. I usually use the standard style, 'portrait' tends to go towards the red as well.
George, I shoot with 2- 20D's, and have noticed that a lot. I do corporate portrait work and continually get work returned because they feel they look to "red" in the face. Definitely not good for business! I use Canons' DPP and have a hard time getting it dialed in, when I take the red out, it then leans towards a greenish cast. I'm all ears if someone has figured out a quick fix and thanks for bringing up the thread.
Like other posters have said, ACR needs too much tweakin for skin tones. I find using DPP Standard or Faithful to be much better (oddly, I don't care for Portrait most of the time). I have a custom picture style based on standard (just a couple minor tweaks) I use for portraits. Thus it opens as default in DPP and often requires zero pre-conversion tweaks.
this will help while printing you can set your info pallete to show cmyk values, generally like the page above states you don't want your magenta values exceeding yellows. It does work and its a simple fix using curves.
I started with neutral but found it too low in contrast for me and my pics were noisier than in other styles for some reason (30D). I now use Portrait with the tone shifted one notch away from red. Some people are still red - i'm one of them - in photos. I noticed it at a wedding in September - the groom and his dad were red compared to anyone else at the wedding and in different lighting too.
DPP is excellent. I did attend a seminar where C1 was used form start to finish (PS too of course at the end) and I was pretty impressed - I really liked one feature it had - you could turn on a mask like tool and set the min and max numbers and any tones over than setting (like 245+) would show green and any tones under (5-) would show red. No guessing or approximating where you image sits - you get EXACTLY the tonal range you want, every time. It also had an eye dropper like PS. I wish DPP had these!
I found that sometimes this is caused by oversaturation.
Compared with the XT and 20D, the picture styles for the 5D -- and the auto default for ACR -- exhibit higher saturation. I think this is one of the reasons why people like the 5D's results on landscapes out-of-camera.
In addition to your color tweeks, try dropping the saturation of the face just a hair (no pun intended).
George:
I'll opine that it is NOT the 5D. All dSLRs have some near IR sensitivity, as articulated by post above with SmugMug link. Moreover, lots of pale, fair-skinned people, infants, etc., reflect this red from their blood vessels through their skin. I photograph working people in the field under hot sweaty conditions, so this is common. dSLRs are accurate and sensitive; they are picking up all these red tones your mind "blocks out."
DPP does a better job than ACR, partly because it gets the WB more accurate under difficult or mixed lighting, in my opinion. Sometimes I'll use Picture Style Standard with the Tone+1 and Sat -1.
The money making payday fix I use is simple FAST PS technique called "unifying skin tones" by Jack Davis and Ben Willmore in their How-to-Wow PS for Photography book. This one fix makes me "money shot" fixes every week. Your first successful use more than pays the book.
Instead of endorsing some book why not share how its done ??
J Rabin wrote:
George:
I'll opine that it is NOT the 5D. All dSLRs have some near IR sensitivity, as articulated by post above with SmugMug link. Moreover, lots of pale, fair-skinned people, infants, etc., reflect this red from their blood vessels through their skin. I photograph working people in the field under hot sweaty conditions, so this is common. dSLRs are accurate and sensitive; they are picking up all these red tones your mind "blocks out."
DPP does a better job than ACR, partly because it gets the WB more accurate under difficult or mixed lighting, in my opinion. Sometimes I'll use Picture Style Standard with the Tone+1 and Sat -1.
The money making payday fix I use is simple FAST PS technique called "unifying skin tones" by Jack Davis and Ben Willmore in their How-to-Wow PS for Photography book. This one fix makes me "money shot" fixes every week. Your first successful use more than pays the book.
It's a bad photo (not mine!!), but here is an extreme example from a Canon P&S camera of an excited couple whose herd tested clean. It was more than 100 degrees, hard work, thus red skin expected: http://postit.rutgers.edu/uploads/DairyHerdHealth%5FRedCorrect.jpg
It's a powerful simple technique that works good.
UV light registers as red which tends to exacerbate the red skin tones. A good UV filter, one that is coated for digital) helps cut out the extra UV rays that are registering red in the photos.
That said, you also need to be aware of light bounce between the UV filter and the front element and to take it off if it is causing you problems.
No matter what though, you will always have images to correct. The best jpg programs I have found are iCorrect EditLab and Bibble Pro for JPG files. Bibble Pro will also do your RAW files which is really it's intended use. iCorrect EditLab is the jpg processor of choice and is as good as a 1 click operation or you can really get into it. It almost can make shooting RAW a non-necessity, it's quite good.
why not share how its done ??