Skin Tone Values

Unlike neutral grays or highlights, where RGB values are equal, skin tones are a bit more unruly. Skin tones are not supposed to be neutral (unless you are retouching images of dead people or Cardassians, of course), and there are certainly a wide range of skin tone types, from really red Scottish redheads, to green-tinted Asians, to dark-toned Africans. But here is a simplifying concept: in nearly all skin, there’s more red than green, and more green than blue. If a face has this pattern—R > G > B—it’s going to look human. Now, of course the redheaded Scottish man will have greater separation of R and G than the green-tinted Asian woman, who will in turn likely have tighter B-to-G  ratio than the African boy. And in darker tonal areas of the skin, the RGB ratios all tend to tighten up, so there is lots of room for fine-tuning! But the take-home message—and nearly always a good starting point for working with skin tones—is R > G > B. And remember it’s all about relative, not absolute, values, because the absolutes change with the tonal value area.