Other people have mentioned the same thing here before, I think it looks good in the right shot but it's overused.
Lots of time though, I think it has to be un-corrected exposure. If the skin tone range is compressed because an image is a little underexposed, it will appear to be over-saturated and saturated reds really show up on monitors. To me, this is the best argument for shooting RAW files. The exposure can be optimized, particularly the shadow end during the conversion.
My D1X seems to saturate the high side of the red channel by 10 to 20 levels. I generally use a white or grey reference point and a curves adjustment layer to balance it out... takes 30 secs or so.
Here's an example:
#1 is straight from the camera, auto WB, no adjustments on the RAW conversion. It's slightly underexposed with no shadow detail and very red because it's over-saturated.
#2 is the same except I fit the histogram during RAW conversion to expand the shadow end of the range. Even though I didn't correct the color, the red is reduced a lot.
#3 is same as #2 but I applied corrections (two curves adjustment layers; 1 for the shadow range & 1 for the highlight range) to make the background a true white (technically a very light grey with RG&B all having equal values). It's waaay oversaturated at this point because color correction with curves increases saturation.
#4 is the color corrected image. I reduced the overall saturation by moving the gamma slider left on a levels adjustment layer.
Once you have the hang of it, this is much quicker and easier to do than to talk about. I think lots of times people just don't realize their image is too red because it has a pleasing effect.
With the image above, I actually like #2 with the red only slightly reduced better than #3... It's winter and she's of German descent... her skin is practically transparent right now.
I wasn't aiming this at anyone in particular, just seemed like a good place to share what I've learned about color correction in PS. Color correction used to boggle me until I learned how to do it by the numbers, now it's easy.
Later,
Chip
Google
IP: 66.82.9.68
Linear Mode
