The Colour Of Skin - Part 2
Sunday, June 08, 2014
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| Caitlin Legault, Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD Fuji Reala (the best scan I was able to get after many efforts) |
It may be simply an apocryphal story and it
never happened. But one of the employees of an erstwhile photographic lab, G.
King once told me that a wedding photographer had left his colour negative
rolls of wedding for processing. But let me digress a tad.
One of the advantages of shooting film in
that rosy past is that a lab would process your film, produce proofs with
pretty good colour and then at more or less reasonable rates provide the
photographer with very good custom prints. Today photographers have to sift
through hundreds of pictures and somehow must now (because of stiff
competition) provide their clients with reasonably fixed proofs. Some
photographers send their raw files to fixer-uppers in India who laboriously colour
correct and fix bags and wrinkles.
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| An accidental exposure, Fuji X-E1 at 5500 degrees Kelvin white balance |
This present situation was mostly the realm
of the then ubiquitous photo lab.
The story, the apocryphal one, was that the
folks that processed the wedding photographer’s pictures worked all night
without being able to give both the groom and the bride a pleasant skin colour.
The problem with wedding photographs is
that grooms usually dress in black and the brides in white. This combination is
terrible because of the extreme contrast.
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| Fuji X-E1 |
When our wedding photographer returned to
pick up his wedding proofs he was met by the somber staff. The photographer
looked at the pictures and simply said, “The wedding dress was pink, not
white!”
In order to make the pink dress white the
colour printer had to subtract yellow and cyan (to cool the pink). By doing so
the printer made the bride’s face green/blue/cyan. Had the lab known the dress
was pink…
Because we humans see the colours on the
red side of the spectrum better that those on the blue towards the UV (of which
we are blind, unlike dogs) we like the “warm” colours and more or less dislike
the “cold” colours. We dislike the cold/cool colours if they are cast on a
portrait. If we take a portrait of a doctor in a hospital in a narrow hospital
corridor with green walls, our brain will tell us that his skin is just the way
it is, but our cameras, even digital cameras (not properly used) will show a
face with a green cast.
If
you take a portrait of Prime Minister Harper and tweak his face to have
a green/cyan cast you will look at it and say to yourself, “What a nasty man.”
You are being affected not only by your perception of the man on his actions
but also the colour of his skin (without you really being all that aware of) is
contributing to your negative take on the man.
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| Fuji X-E1 |
In the 80s film, colour film, was made to
produce healthy skin tones. Healthy skin tones in the 80s had to be sun tanned.
These films were sold as warm films. I wrote about that here.
I have always been attracted to accuracy in
colour. I know that when I photograph my blue hostas in the garden they will
look bluer than they really are. The reason is that blue hostas have a UV
coating that protects them from harsh sunlight. The UV coating bounces off UV
and the ancillary blue light. Plus since my blue hostas are in the shade, you
will suspect that the light in the shade will be bluer, too.
If you think about this you might suspect
that since humans are such a jumble of combinations that human skin is a
rainbow spectrum all in itself. Besides a person wearing sun block, and his or
her brother not, will photograph differently.
To make this very long story short, I am
obsessed with the accuracy of human skin colour. The Holy Grail is to be able
to photograph a real red head and get skin and hair colour just right. A red
head’s skin has blue in it. If you want to make the red of the hair red you
must add yellow and red when you attempt to balance your picture. When you do
this you warm up the bluish skin and make it pink. And that is not accurate.
For years my Kodak Ektachrome made my
neutral gray studio background (particularly when I used a studio flash) have a
blue/green cast. If I tried to make that gray remain gray it would affect the
skin colour of my subjects.
The reason is that film is stupid and it is
principally balanced for 5500 degrees Kelvin which is the colour of sunlight at
noon in Washington, D.C. midsummer. If you read the blog linked
above you will note that the colour of light varies with latitude. The light in
Whistler is bluer. The light at the equator is whiter.
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| Fuji X-E1 |
Digital cameras, even the cheaper ones,
have something called automatic white balance. Digital cameras are a lot
smarter than film (but I must note here, that some photographers might be
smarter than their digital cameras) so they handle most situations better than
film. But they have their limits.
Not a few weeks ago I photographed a lovely
blonde lawyer standing inside one of the top floors of the Hong Kong Bank, by a
large window facing north. It was a dismal and overcast afternoon. I
photographed her with my digital Fuji X-E1 and flash. Had I used a film camera
with either transparency or colour negative (both films balanced to more or
less accurately reproduce that noon sunlight (or a good studio flash) the
pictures would have been just fine.
But my pictures were not just fine. The lawyer’s
white skin was transformed to skin of someone who likes her claret. This idiot
(a photographer not as smart as his digital camera) had set the Fuji for Automatic White
Balance. The camera saw the dismal blue background and decided to warm it up
with disastrous results.
The next time around I circumvented Auto
White Balance and set my camera at 5500 degrees Kelvin. My subject was Caitlin.
I photographed her with a new (for me) Fuji
colour negative film called Reala. The results were odd and I had to put a lot
of effort to get a skin tone that looked right. The Fuji X-E1 pictures were a
tad warmish. Next time I photograph Caitlin (soon, I hope) I will see what
upping the white balance to 5800 does to render her skin less warm.
But the biggest of all problems is that I do
all my balancing on my computer. My monitor is adequately colour corrected, but
then who really knows? And there seems to be no universal standard for monitor brightness.
The proof of the pudding, and there is not much
of that is to look at a hard copy print. Only then will you and I both be able to
assert, what is accurate skin colour.
The Colour of Skin by Ilse T. Hable
The Colour of Skin by Ilse T. Hable
