A Quick and Easy Way to Enhance Skin Tones Using Photoshop

Whether it's because you're shooting in the dead of winter or just because your model is naturally pale, sometimes, you'll want to add slightly more vibrant tones that give your subject richer skin. This helpful tutorial will show you how to do just that quickly and effectively.

Coming to you from Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect, this video will show you how to add more vibrant tones to a subject's skin. Living in Cleveland, people are naturally paler here during the winter (we don't see the sun between November and March; feel free to send me photos of it), and I've often had subjects request that I make them a bit tanner, which is when this method is particularly handy. As he mentions, be sure to change the blending mode to Multiply: this takes the normalized (on a scale from 0 to 1) RGB values of the two layers and multiples the components from each slot together. This results in a darker image and helps to make the effect more believable than other blending modes would. On the same topic, remember that like most such effects, less is more. Keep your adjustments subtle to make the final image believable. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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3 Comments

Thanks Alex. I’m not sure I’d use this method to tone skin but I like his method of selecting the right colour. Much faster than fussing about with the colour picker. Never thought of that.

Quick and easy steps.

Hmm.The 'before' is approximately 93.7 million times better to my eye.