In a world where pale skin seems to be an obsession, the skin tone in any photos of Thai girls can be a critical issue.

 

If I leave the camera (Fuji X-M1) on auto white balance, there's big difference between skin tones when using natural light and flash.   I don't want to shoot RAW and mess about in post processing - but just wondering if your camera has the same difference in skin tones under different light?

 

The two photos below were taken minutes apart - but as the natural light photo was not sharp due to the long exposure, I popped up the flash for the second photo.  I use a flash diffuser (well, a white tissue - because I don't like that full-on flash look from using on-camera flash) - but with auto white balance and auto flash the skin tones are very different.  The 'model' much preferred the slightly out of focus pale skinned shot compared to the darker skinned, in focus shot.  I prefer the darker skin - which is closer to her real skin tone - but don't tell her as the other shot is now all over Facebook!

 

Shoot RAW; or black & white!

RAW will always be better and allows for greater corrections than with jpgs.  Your jpgs will just start looking crappier over time and especially if you do any work on them.  

But if you don't want to do that, change the white balance on the camera from auto to flash when lighting dictates.  Also you could "correct" (being subjective of course) the color of the flash shot easily to come closer to the non-flash shot in Pshop. 

16 hours ago, emanphoto said:

RAW will always be better and allows for greater corrections than with jpgs.  Your jpgs will just start looking crappier over time and especially if you do any work on them.  

But if you don't want to do that, change the white balance on the camera from auto to flash when lighting dictates.  Also you could "correct" (being subjective of course) the color of the flash shot easily to come closer to the non-flash shot in Pshop. 

I guess I should really shoot RAW so the white balance will not be an issue, but most of my editing is done on a tablet - so working with jpeg files is simpler.  Good idea to set the white balance manually.

Yeah a tablet isn't a good working method unless you absolutely have to and adding RAW files to it is going to fill it up fast.  But then top quality jpgs will do the same thing eventually.  

You can color correct jpegs but working in RAW w/Lightroom, I can select a series of images, do the corrections on 1 image, then hit Synch and the corrections I tell it to will be nearly instantly applied to all the selected images.  In pshop you have to open each image, correct, then save.  In LR everything is done in the metadata so the image is not changed until you export once you've finished working on them.  At that point you can export as jpeg, tiff, etc at whatever quality level you want.

LR for me also helps organize all these images, but that's a whole 'nother subject. 

two pictures are in different shooting moods and tones.  the first picture seems to be over exposed, white flare out and no black.  her face is about right for 'pale skin' perception.  the second picture, exposure is good ( still a lot of dark grey to black ).  see a lot of fine noise especially in the mid tone, it is typically from the default in-camera JPEG compression.

 

if you need to deal with skin tone, go for RAW as other suggested.  not only you have better flexibility of fine tuning the picture, you have better quality in packing the picture in JPEG compression.  I have a Surface Pro 3 in my camera bag, exactly for this purpose.

This "corrected" version took me 2 mins in pshop.  I did a color correction with a Curves layer and used Athentech's PerfectlyClear filter for the rest of the corrections.  PerfectlyClear is somewhat automated so you can do the work pretty quickly with it.

If you are shooting in Jpeg and want the skin tones perfect, every time you really have no choice other than to set a custom white balance for each shot, preferably using a grey card.  Other than that, shoot RAW. 

 

Post processing isn't difficult. It intimidates many people because it seems so overwhelming a first. Pick a photo, and follow a tutorial on youtube or online and you'll have it down in no time.