There are many books, articles and web based tutorials on the art of
retouching the human skin. In general, most of these deal with the
concept that skin colors all fall within a given range based on the race
of the subject. While this is a generalized concept, it is difficult to
apply this idea to skin retouching in a realistic manner. Using such
concepts and applying the normal tools available to us in our digital
editing programs, we tend to get widely varying results even among
supposedly similar images. In our development of the Portraiture plugin,
weve discovered quite a few unique things about the composition and
digital portrayal of human skin. Weve done this through careful,
nitpicking analysis of thousands of images shot in various lighting
scenarios as well as by actually taking skin color samples with specific
hardware. Weve found that there is a vastly varying tonality to the
human skin, even within the range of one persons body. Figure 1 below
shows such a sampled variation and also goes to prove that even though
there arent really big differences in the RGB values of each patch, our
eyes can perceive a lot of variation due to the lightness and darkness
of each patch, and not just the actual color.
