Skin 101: Lighting, Retouching and Understanding Skin

Capturing beautiful skin tones is essential to the success of any portrait, yet skin is notoriously difficult to photograph and retouch. Skin comes in all colors, tones, and textures — each requiring different treatment.

Learn how to handle your subject's skin and add polish to all of your portraits. In this course, Lindsay Adler will take you through the essentials of understanding, lighting, photographing and retouching skin in all its variations.

Lay a strong foundation for a great shoot by learning easy make-up tips. Get an in-depth look at how light modifiers, reflectors, and direction of light impact the appearance of skin for both natural light and studio lighting. Learn advanced color calibration and color correction. Master setting up your camera to capture accurate color and when to modifying in post-production to get ideal skin representation.

Lindsay will teach you how to work with a variety of skin textures and tones – whether the skin is very pale, extremely dark, very oily, has extreme blemishes and much more. You’ll learn everything from how to photograph each type of skin to how to retouch these varieties in skin.

Software Used: Adobe Photoshop CC 14.2

• Skin Essentials: White Balance
• Shoot: Setting White Balance Demo
• Skin Essentials: Mixed Lighting, Color Contamination
• Camera Settings: Files
• Camera Settings: Color Spaces
• Color Management
• Exposure
• Shoot: Quality of Light
• Direction of Light
• Makeup: Basics
• Shoot: Contouring
• Retouching
• Shoot: Oily Skin
• Shoot: Wrinkled Skin
• Shoot: Blotchy or Blemished Skin
• Skin Challenges: Pale and Dark
• Shoot: Dark Skin
• Dark Skin Q&A
• Shoot: Pale Skin and Multiple Skin Tones
• Shoot: Dark Skin in Sunlight
• Shoot: Mixed Tones and Pale Skin in Sunlight
• Skin Challenges: Dark Skin Outside
• Skin Challenges: Multiple Skin Tones Outside
• Shoot: Male Fitness
• Shoot: Female Beauty
• Retouching: Workspace Setup
• Retouching Skin: Removing Redness
• Retouching Skin: Basic Tools
• Retouching Skin: Frequency Separation
• Retouching: Contouring
• Retouching Contouring Wrinkles
• Retouching Skin: Oily and Freckles
• Retouching: Mixed Lighting
• Retouching: Color Casts
• Retouching: Color Correction
• Retouching: Shaping the Face
• Retouching: Beauty