One of the most common issues we hear people having is when they’re trying to either use a preset, or photographed a situation in tricky lighting is that they just can’t get the skin tones right. I’m sure you have been in there in the past, the skin tone is either too green, too yellow, too grey etc etc. You probably get frustrated and change the preset to a different one and the same thing happens. A preset isn’t magic… it doesn’t know what in the photo is grass, trees or water so it obviously changes the entire image including the skin which we want to look like the creamy beautiful skin that it is!

One helpful trick you can try to correct skin tones is to look at the RGB numbers. To do this, go to your Develop module in Lightroom, and click on the eyedropper in the White Balance section:

To see where your numbers are, hover it over part of the skin that you’re having trouble with. Try to avoid areas that are naturally red (lips, cheeks, tip of the nose) or areas that are blown out or in extreme shadow.

We’re looking for trends to help us figure out what’s going on. There is no exact science to the “right” number (especially since no two people have the exact same color skin), but these can help if you’re stuck.

What you’re looking for: Red will be highest. Blue will be lowest. Green is in the middle. The higher the numbers, the lighter the skin (you can see in the examples below that the super fair little girl has a R value of 84.8, whereas the man with darker skin has 50.8)

You’re looking for a 10-20 percentage spread between your R and B values, with G somewhere in the middle (this one is highly subjective – do you like your images more magenta? more green?). If you don’t have this spread and your numbers are very close to each other, they’ll look grey and muddy.

White balance is the first thing you should work on adjusting if you’re having trouble with skin tones.

You can adjust your Temp and Tint while you’re hovering with the eyedropper by using your arrow keys. Up/Down adjusts Temp, and Right/Left adjusts Tint. Pick an image and go try it – watch how the numbers change.

Changing Exposure will also change the numbers – bringing up the exposure will bring up the values.

If you’ve adjusted WB and Exposure, and your skin is still looking off and the numbers aren’t evenly spread out, head down to the HSL panel. Reds and Oranges are the most common colors in skin tones, so try adjusting those and see what happens. If you bring Orange Luminance up, for example, it will “brighten” all of the orange areas, which includes skin, and you’ll see a significant change in the numbers.