Color & Toning

Why Your Portrait Colors Look Wrong (And the Correction Order That Actually Fixes Them)
Color & Toning

Why Your Portrait Colors Look Wrong (And the Correction Order That Actually Fixes Them)

A few years back, I delivered a full gallery to a beauty client and sat back feeling pretty good about myself. Clean skin, nice contrast, everything looked sharp on my monitor. Then her art director replied with one word: “Orange.” She was right. Every single image had a warm cast baked so deeply into the highlights that the model’s cheekbones looked like tangerines. I had been so focused on frequency separation and skin smoothing that I had skipped the foundation entirely.

Why Your Portrait Colors Look Wrong (And the Correction Workflow That Actually Fixes Them)
Color & Toning

Why Your Portrait Colors Look Wrong (And the Correction Workflow That Actually Fixes Them)

The Muddy Skin Problem Nobody Talks About Enough Last winter I was wrapping up a batch of beauty shots for a skincare client, feeling pretty good about my curves work, when I zoomed out and noticed something immediately wrong. The model’s face looked vaguely greenish, like she’d spent the week slightly ill. The background was a clean white. The photographer had shot under LED panels mixed with a daylight fill card, and my white balance correction hadn’t gone nearly deep enough.