And when you think you've got it, allow me to raise a related question.
Who decided what pleasing skin tone actually is?
Was there a majority vote, which I apparently missed. Was there a panel that had different choices put in front of them, and they consistently rated some deviation from accurate as more pleasing? Was it decided because some images were reordered more due to some deviant color reproduction? Were there ethnic preferences that differ between ethnicities? Does solid research exist about the issue, where is it published? Other sources?
Just raising a serious question (sorry for that),
Bart
Bart--those are excellent serious questions. And I'll try to answer them the best way that *I* know how... there are others, no doubt, who could answer them more fully.
It's not a "majority vote" exactly, but years of printing practice in the photographic, fine art and publishing fields.
Perception doesn't vary by ethnicity, per se, to my knowledge though I daresay it could for all I know, but I know it does by culture. Lee Varis, an accomplished photographer and the author of a book called "Skin"
http://www.amazon.com/Skin-Complete-Digitally-Photographing-Retouching/dp/047004733X
has a great chapter on two mistakes he made as an American with creating (not recording) appropriate or pleasing skin tones in prints from digital cameras.
The first was in shipping a bunch of files to be corrected in China, and when they came back they were extremely pale and cyanotic looking to his eyes--and to his clients. Evidently, extreme paleness is highly prized (or was when the story happened, perhaps) and so that's how they corrected.
Another story he tells is how he had an Indian client, and in a similar fashion, he found his clients wanted to look a bit lighter as a mark of "higher class."
Here in NA, for a long time, a nice tan on caucasian subjects has signified health and wealth (leisure). I read recently that 100 years ago, a tan was a sign of working outside and associated with lower classes
African Americans often react to skin that appears too yellow for their taste, which is a common occurence again, with the way the "digital system" records skin tones. FWIW, it's common for me to book clients based on how I treat skin in prints, and just a couple of weeks ago I had an African Canadian hire me based on my appreciation of skin tones in printing. This is not uncommon.
So this appears to be just an art, and craft, but like all arts, it has its technological underpinnings. For many of us, for many years, the science came from people at Kodak and Fuji and Afga and Ciba. They created films that--in the right light and with the right processing--could guarantee good skin tones. And photographers got used to that...
In fact, in some ways with film the photographer's job was to control or create the right light for the film. Extreme examples of control for colour's sake would fall to the movie industry and things like the Technicolor process, which required experts on set with certain colour paints, fabrics, etc... all to ensure a certain look from the final result.
Even on film, though, certain films had reputations for different ways to reproduce colour. Personally, for wedding skin tones, where I want something elegant and realistic (in the lighting too) I would never have used something that looked like Velvia
Now--enter digital sensors. In some ways, the collective memory of film results vanish nearly overnight! Some people shooting today have never seen a fine colour print, and few new photographers work with an established lab. Some labs even, can't make the transition from film to digital.
You yourself said they're more prone to IR (which is true) and overall, they react to light differently than film.
But there's no going back. As photographers, we can now work with or provide every different kind of light--the choices are liberating! But we now are our own perceptual colour experts as well.
There are days when I long to just throw my VPS III or Portra at the lab and get fabulous prints back
Sigh.
So the tradition of good skin tones, including the ratios of colour and correction we've been mentining in this thread, go back a long way.
Do they change over time? Yes. Especially when I read European fashion magazines, they tend to balance far more cyan (sorry--very little red and a lot more blue) in their skin.
It looks "dead" to me, but obviously some people like it, and like the "otherworldly" effect (in truth it looks almost like a subtle cross=process to me, which was used a lot in fashion advertising for effect).
And over time, I've noticed a very pronounced and solid "brown" coming into NA fashion magazines (Vanity Fair). Annie L's work., in particular, is very consistent as printed. This surprised me--even her pix of Queen Elizabeth II have a more definite brown tone (less magenta in the mix) than I expected. I don't expect her to look deathly pale or anything, but also not like she lives in Carmel
So the ratios for skin tones are a way of describing a historical tradition in representing skin, but like many things about "taste" are less subjective than you might think.
People really do notice if their skin displeases them, or if you make their uncle look drunk because he has rosacea and that's what the frigging infra-red sensitive digital camera actually "made worse" with a "neutral" white balance!
So you know the old expression
ars longa, vita brevis? It applies here, I think.
If anyone has any better information, I'd love to hear it.
I know many of the best photographers have workflows to painstakingly reproduce good skin tones, and a lot are loathe to tell their "secrets"; the whole point of something like the ColorRight is to make that process faster and more consistent, and it does a very good job of that.
