Spray Tanner = Portraits of Orange People
—curing the Oompa Loompa syndrome
Posted on 01 March 2010
Cameras see things the human eye misses. Sometimes it’s because the (daylight adjusted) flash or even actual daylight, working in combination with the camera’s ability to see light outside the normal human visual spectrum, results in capturing things we never saw in the first place. Frequently these invisible things turn out to be skin irregularities. Trust me, I’ve seen my portrait unretouched and I have a bunch of little blemishes and imperfections that are simply invisible to the naked eye.
But I discovered another one of those camera anomalies recently that’s kind of interesting. People who use self-tanners (sprays and lotions) look tan to the naked eye but the camera sees them as orange. There’s something about the artificial tan that makes people simply look far too orange, and traditional color correction will fix everything else in the image, but you have to specifically isolate the artificially tanned skin and hit it with some kind of anti-orange process in Photoshop. And it’s really bad when one person in a group shot is artificially tan and others aren’t. That’s when it really shows.
To fix it in Photoshop, I use a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, pull down the saturation in the yellow channel, and then use the attached layer mask to isolate it to the person’s skin.
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