Help with correcting skin tone.

[julianliu]

Since I don't have PS, it would simply not occur to me to create colors, because I wouldn't be able to if I tried. Therefore; my approach would be to either wait for the colors to occur naturally, or just make the best photograph I could with the conditions as they existed.

Frankly, your SOOC shots are not bad except for the choice of background. IOW; I would try to find a place to pose the model without the boats showing.

The second sets are not SOOC, they were still edited in Lightroom, just basic recovery of the highlights and opening up the shadows though.

Your advice about the background is insightful and I agree with it. Now I have a better idea of choosing a background for portraits.

Thanks! I am surprised at how much I learned here.

 

[TrolleySwag]

The 2nd set is much more natural looking.

Thanks for pointing that out. I agree the 2nd set looks more natural but also too flat to my taste. But I admit my post processing is a work in progress.

My post processing is a work in progress too. Hard to find the balance.

 

[jovince3000]

Post processing is mostly a matter of taste, some will like it, some will not. No matter what you do. Ultimately it's for you to decide what's your style. If you like over-saturated sunset, go knock yourself out. The colours of the skin in the first post you showed were perfectly fine, it looked natural and fitting in my opinion (maybe just the last image had a bit too much yellow on the skin though, a tad too much? May be my monitor on my side so don't think too much of it).

The second set of image you showed does indeed look natural, but I honestly think natural is overrated in that case. First set has some sort of surreal feeling given to it that just make the scene that much more pleasant to look at.

 

[julianliu]

Post processing is mostly a matter of taste, some will like it, some will not. No matter what you do. Ultimately it's for you to decide what's your style. If you like over-saturated sunset, go knock yourself out. The colours of the skin in the first post you showed were perfectly fine, it looked natural and fitting in my opinion (maybe just the last image had a bit too much yellow on the skin though, a tad too much? May be my monitor on my side so don't think too much of it).

The second set of image you showed does indeed look natural, but I honestly think natural is overrated in that case. First set has some sort of surreal feeling given to it that just make the scene that much more pleasant to look at.

Thanks for your confirmation that the skin tones look fine.
I agree post processing is done according to personal taste. But I think the basic guideline is not to make image look weird. Making skin tone too pale or too red will be one case in the situation of portraits. I think high level post processing would be to make the image pleasant to look at, improving the quality of the image while looks like not much editing was done to the image at all.