Adjusting Skin Tones

Most of us have had those pictures that needed just a little tweak to get the right skin color. In Paint Shop Pro 7 skin tones are easily corrected with the Manual Color Correction tool.

I'm using a computer generated image instead of a photo but this technique will work for either.

Open the image that needs skin tone correction.

Go to Effects>Enhance Photo>Manual Color Correction.

The Manual Color Correction dialog will open. As you can see from the Color Category, skin tones are not the only thing that can be corrected with this tool. For whatever reason when I open this dialog I have to click on the Gray World button then Skintones to get the preview to work properly. Once I get the preview working I open the preset colors by clicking on the arrow next to it's preview and I then choose the skin tone I want to use.

The Preserve Lightness and Preserve Saturation Options can really make a difference in how the image progresses.

The image below is with only Preserve Lightness checked. It's a bit orange and not quite what I wanted. I also could have used the selection tool and selected only the area of the skin that I wanted to change. Because this kind of correction is fairly quick; I like to just run through the different options, trying them until I find the settings I want. Then I'll go back and make a selection of only the area I want to change.

I can either start over or I can adjust the contrast with the Automatic Contrast Enhancement tool.

Below are the settings I used to adjust the contrast.

As you can see below that helped a little but it's still not really what was needed for this image.

I'll go back to manual correction and start over making sure I Preserve Lightness and Preserve Saturation.

Now, for a computer generated image that looks pretty good. It has a much more earthy tone to the skin.

    
Corrected Version                                  Original Version

Copyright Vikki Olds, All Rights Reserved