Giving faces a livelier touch

Hi,

I was recently working with some portrait images where the people in the picture looked rather pale. I am looking for the best way to give the faces a livelier and more tanned look, without distorting the rest of the image too much. From working with my camera, this seems to be influenced strongly by the white balance / color temperature setting of a picture, and thus I settled on the color temperate function in PhotoPerfect in order to reach this livelier look (Image->Color type->Color temperature). This seems to work quite well on most pictures. Is this the best way of doing this in Photoperfect or which way would you recommend?

-Al.

Hi Al,

Altering the color temperature is one possibility, however the whole picture will be changed as well.

Selectively increase the saturation of the skin tone may therefore be a probably (better) alternative. Please choose either "Image-Saturation-Selective Saturation by Spectrum" or "Image-Saturation-Color Vibrancy" in PhotoPerfect.

Then select the skin tone by double-clicking on the face of the person you would like to edit and gently adjust the corresponding saturation slider until you are satisfied with the result. As skin tone contains quite a bit of reddish tone, by increasing the saturation in this color range, you increase the percentage of red in the face area resulting in a more vivid skin tone.

Besides by using this function, you only change the skin tone and leave other color range untouched.