How to capture natural skin tones in your portrait photos

Capturing natural, accurate skin tones is one of the most challenging aspects of portrait photography. Unusual lighting and strange colour casts can leave your portrait-sitter with sickly looking skin that can take an age to put right in post-production. But while we can't all afford to have a make-up artist on stand-by, there are a number of ways that you can get fresh, clean tones straight from your EOS camera and reduce the amount of retouching you need to do.

Here, award-winning fashion and beauty photographer Jade Keshia Gordon offers five simple tips for capturing perfect skin tones. She explains how she approaches black, white and mixed-race skin differently, and how she sets up her EOS camera for consistent results.

Follow Jade's advice, and you'll be capturing perfect skin tones in no time!

Softer light is generally more flattering. Shooting outdoors on a bright but overcast day will give a diffuse illumination that suits all types of skin tone. On clear sunny days, where the light is unfiltered and harsh, it's often better to find some light shade so you can avoid shadows and hotspots on faces.

"When it comes to skin tone, the first thing you have to think about is your lighting," confirms Jade. "If it's hitting your subject face-on and they have lighter skin, they could end up looking washed out. So you need to be prepared to reduce the exposure, or alternatively switch the subject around so that the light is coming from behind them.

"When I'm working in a studio, I like to have a two-light set-up, with one light behind the subject, illuminating the backdrop, and then a beauty dish at the front, slightly off-centre from the model in order to light up their face."

Jade regularly shoots models with different skin tones, and adopts a different approach for each.

"It's important to avoid over exposing white skin when you're shooting a portrait," she explains. "You want to make sure that you can see the textures and any freckles or make-up. If the highlights are burned out, it can be hard or impossible to bring them back."

"With black skin tone, you need plenty of light," continues Jade. "Black absorbs light, so you need to make sure you have enough light to highlight the features. It's a thin line, though, as too much will overexpose the skin and wash the features out.

"I tend to find that backlighting works well for mixed-race skin tones, whether it's a studio light or the sun. It brings a nice light around the sides of the face, and you can use a reflector to bounce some of that light back onto the face."

Choosing one of the preset Picture Style options in-camera takes care of a whole array of settings for you – each Picture Style offers a different blend of sharpness, contrast, saturation and colour tone, and they can have markedly different effects on skin tone in a portrait. As you might expect, the Portrait Picture Style is optimised for shots that include people, with the sharpness moderately reduced and the brightness slightly increased to give softer-looking skin.

"Here, I prefer the Portrait setting, as the one I shot using the Standard Picture Style felt a bit flat," says Jade. "Portrait gently enhances any red undertone in the image. So it brought out the best in the model's pink top, and because she is black, that red boost helped to lift her skin tone without making her too orangey red."

If you find the default Portrait Picture Style produces skin tones that are a little too reddish or yellowish under the lighting conditions, use the Colour Tone slider in the Picture Style menu to correct this.

For consistent skin colours, choose a white balance preset that matches the lighting conditions, or create your own using the Custom White Balance option in the camera's main menu. As long as the lighting doesn't change, you'll get the same results from shot to shot.

If you leave the white balance set to Auto, the camera will adjust the colour temperature to remove colour casts. This can produce skin tones that are too 'warm' (orange) or too 'cool' (blue). If you shoot RAW you can change the white balance later in editing, but setting it correctly in-camera gives you a more accurate preview.

"In these examples, you can see the effect that using a different white balance has on the model's skin tone," explains Jade. "I prefer the results using the Daylight setting here, as it doesn't wash her out and it doesn't make her overly orange-toned. It just lifts the colours slightly and is closer to what I saw with my eyes at the time."

If you do shoot JPEG or HEIF, then you need to get the settings right in-camera before you shoot. This includes the colour space, which determines the range of colour that can be displayed in a photo. You can set this in your camera's main menu.

Jade always shoots RAW, and recommends doing so even if you are new to portrait photography, as this makes it easier to fine-tune the skin tone later. RAW files hold more picture information than JPEGs or HEIF files, and you can freely adjust picture parameters such as white balance, colour characteristics and sharpness using RAW processing and editing software such as Canon Digital Photo Professional without affecting the original image data.


Written by Marcus Hawkins