Most of the time, for most images, the Shadow-Highlight-Neutral procedure (see the video) will result in substantial improvement and a basis for more subtle curve moves. Fine. What about images that don't have a neutral - or for that matter, a shadow or highlight? For those images, our job, as always, is to avoid impossible colors, or colors that will trigger a response in the viewer that something is wrong.

Many people hit a wall when it comes to color correcting flesh tones, and with good reason. Flesh tones are all different, and flesh tones change with different light and shadow conditions.

What's a color corrector to do? An experienced corrector knows that light skinned people may have an almost pink (red + equal green and blue) complexion. As skin becomes darker, more green is added, creating an orange color.

Yes, many of us are a shade of orange. Remember using crayons as a kid - the flesh colored crayon was well and good, and got worn to a stub or lost immediately, and a light touch with the orange crayon was a very adequate substitute.

But, as this being an intermediate tutorial, many of us are not yet experts in flesh tones. All we can do is move curves around, like an amateur safe cracker with none of the necessary skills. What would really help is the combination to the safe, or at least a list of several possible combinations, nine, to be exact.

Enter this tutorial, "Pinning Flesh Tones". Let's see what we can do by skipping an explicit knowledge of the numbers that go into flesh tones, at least for now, and see how far we can get by simply dragging some standardized colors around on an image.

By the way, if you are the kind of person who likes to see and hear something before reading about it, check out the video tutorial on this same subject of pinning flesh tones.

You may fully participate in this tutorial using the Curvemeister Demo. If you are viewing this tutorial on the web, you may save any of these images at their full original size to your hard drive by right clicking on the image, and saving to an appropriate folder.

For those who desire more detail and depth than is presented here, get Dan Margulis's book, and learn, more about what goes into a good flesh tone, from the master color safe cracker himself. Dan's the man, and don't you forget it!

2. Here we go - the same image, with the skin tone swatches added. I did this by using Canvas Size to add more space to the image, and then copying, pasting, and moving the swatches to the image, and then flattening the image to get rid of any layer structure.

I've rearranged the swatches in a line to save space in this tutorial. Since these will be snipped away shortly, you don't need to worry about this. Just make a nice big margin for the swatches and paste away!

4. Now drag the sample palette over the face of one of the people. Then drag the other end of the red line, the actual sample point, over each of the swatches and pick your favorite reasonably close match.

What are you looking for? Good question. Pick a color whose general brightness falls somewhere between the lightest and darkest part of the face.

5. OK, here's where we do some of that pinning stuff. Click on the small menu button on the palette, and select the Pin to Original Color command. This command locks that small round circle to the color we selected. You will see a small lock icon appear.

On older versions of Curvemeister this menu item is called Pin to Current.

6. Click on and drag the small circle, called an eyedropper sample point from the sample color onto the section of the picture you want to change. Notice how the color under the circle will change to match the original swatch color.

When you drag on the face, some areas will make the image appear washed out, and others will make the image too dark. Pick a pleasant medium.

Notice the wall has turned green! Do not be alarmed, this is a good thing.

7. Now I'll bump the saturation up just a bit, using a curve move called a straight boost (check it out in Curve Moves), which steepens the a and b channels by moving the end points as necessary to form a straighter and steeper line. Making a and b steeper pumps color into your image.

And here's our final image. The faces look a lot better, and it's gratifying that the poinsettias have a more natural look too.

Just for fun, here is the original underexposed image. Night and day, wouldn't you say?

If you want an extra challenge, save the image on the right to your hard drive (right click on it), and see how close you can get to the final image from this tutorial.

Happy curving!