Skin tone correction using RGB Curves in Lightroom 5
When it comes to editing skin tones, Adobe Photoshop has always reigned supreme. Lightroom could change the white balance and even alter the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance values, but this is often not accurate enough to render great skin tones. This changed with the introduction of RGB curves in Lightroom 4, allowing us to change the values of Red, Green & Blue at a specific tonal range of the image. How this changes things will be explained below, but suffice to say it makes for much nicer skin tones without the need to export to photoshop. (Not exporting to photoshop has numerous benefits including file size, no duplicate files, and all changes stay non-destructive.. Not to mention speed of workflow) So let’s get to it.. The image above, straight from camera looks pretty good to start with.. And if you are not looking for a colour cast it would be easy to miss the slightly red/magenta skin tones. (See before and after image at the end of the post for a comparison) Select the sam