best way to fix yellow skin

I usually to skin adjustments in Color Balance. Watch the info palette and shoot for a nearly equal balance between yellow and magenta, with a slight edge given to yellow for a normal skin tone. Of course, a little cyan will be present and it must also be adjusted on occasion. Some people can be very difficult to bring into a normal range. Here is a post from Kevin Brekenridge that I saved about 3 years ago. Hope it helps:

Matching skin tones has driven many scanner operators into retirement.

There is no magic formula or CMYK breakdown, but here are some general rules that have worked for me over the years.

First let me state the obvious, every person has a unique skin tone color, even within specific ethnic groups the variety is limitless. Unfortunately CMYK, and offset printing only allows us a fraction of choices, and equally unfair you are often forced to stereotype people with specific CMYK break downs to trigger those every present memory colors hard wired in our brains.

Take a look around the room, Caucasian, Asian, African American, Hispanic, East Indian, and Native American, all in reality don’t have nearly the saturation of color we see in photographs and publications. So we have to cheat a little to give these images some punch, after all who wants a bunch of pasty smiling people on the cover of their magazine anyway!

A good rule of thumb for most skin tones is to have the magenta trail the yellow and the cyan trail the magenta, very little black even in African American people. Black should only serve to add density to a prominent shadow areas, if you have too much it will neutralize what color you have when it hits the press, those pressman always run up the Black so the text looks sharp.

Here come the stereotypical portion of color correcting skin tones:

When I set up a scan for Caucasian people the Magenta trails the Yellow slightly and the Cyan in less than half of the Magenta.

If I sample a quarter tone area the CMYK might look like this: Cyan: 10 Magenta: 25 Yellow: 30 Black: 0

Asian people get a little more of everything plus a slightly higher separation between the Magenta and Yellow.

If I sample a quarter tone – mid tone area the CMYK might look like this: Cyan: 15 Magenta: 35 Yellow: 45 Black: 0

African Americans and people with darker skin tones get a slightly warmer treatment with enough cyan to keep it from going to red on press.

If I sample a mid tone area the CMYK might look like this: Cyan: 25 Magenta: 47 Yellow: 55 Black: 5

The big trick is to mix it up a bit, I don’t shoot for these numbers every time, I like to ensure the scan prints as close to the original as possible after all that’s what a scanner operator gets paid to do, but if I have some creative license or the photo has poor color and overexposed, I apply these guidelines. I also watch the 3 quarter tones and shadow areas very closely, making sure they don’t over saturate and become dominant. The skin tones should have a consistent Hue regardless of the values from highlight to mid tone to shadow. Don’t make the highlight Yellow, the mid tone Brown and the shadow Red.

You might try a selective colour adjustment layer if all the other colours are intact. Sometimes it works better than hue/sat for this sort of thing.

What i like to do on just small areas of skin like that is to paint on a new layer, set to color, with the opposite color, blue being the opposite of yellow. i use a nice soft brush set to a low opacity so i can control how much color i am aplying.

wade

You can try playing around with the color balance or Hue controls, or levels, but in Photoshop CS there’s an easier way: the MATCH COLOR function.

First mask off the skin areas and copy them to a separate layer.

Next, find another picture with skin tone you’re happy with, even if it’s another person.

Select a small rectangle of skin in each picture, and then use the "Match Color" feature to transform the color.

If the result seems to be too much when you apply the new skin tone, you can use the fade" slider to adjust.

Mike

One way I have found very effective for this problem is: Image>Adjust>Selective Color. From the Pull Down menu, choose the Yellow Channel. Then back off the Yellow slider.
Regards, MM

….

One way I have found very effective for this problem is: Image>Adjust>Selective Color. From the Pull Down menu, choose the Yellow

Channel. Then back off the Yellow slider.

This is the very method I have found quickest and easiest. It can be brought up with the keyboard shortcuts Control-U (Command-U on the Mac) followed by Control-2.

Thanks all for the various suggestions. I tried all of them. Selective color and running down the yellow works noticeably better than my method of desaturating the yellow in H/S. For a very quick fix, painting with low opacity the opposite color (blue) works great. Working the color balance seems like something I would use for overall settings, but it was harder for me to use in specific areas that varied in problem yellow. Match color worked well, just by using a different part of her skin. Thanks again.

John