A headache I’ve heard a lot about from retouchers out there when doing portrait work is dealing with skin tones. Matching tones for a client from multiple locations & lighting scenarios, or even matching the tones from an entirely different person to your current image set, either way, managing that can be a bit of an ordeal for even the best of us. Enter the ColormapX plugin for Photoshop by NBP Plugins.
I’ve talked about these plugins before and how i’ve used them in my workflow for base retouching, color grading, and scene matching in general, (see image directly below), but this recent video from Nino Batista, he shows us how to use it in an entirely new way!
Nino explains how he uses the plugin to grab the tones from one retouched image and then applies it to the another quickly and easily by using a combination of the Plugin and Photoshops own Select Color Range tool! With ColourmapX and a simple Photoshop function, you can make those adjustments in seconds.
Granted, as Nino says in the video, depending on your image you’ll have to make some manual adjustments in the selections and masking. But overall, this should save you an incredible amount of time retouching & tone matching skin! Check out the video to see the plugin in action and let us know what you think in the comments below!