#goretzkas

firstly, the basic idea of how to make reds in skintones pop is to build up the green, it will neutralize the yellow and red that you see all over the face, that way when you do up the red it will only grab onto the most red parts of a person's face aka the lips!

LEVELS:

so ofc, as always, I start of with levels, as always, I use the top black pipet to grab the darkest part of the picture which most of the time is at the collar or under a cap.

then at the levels I play around a little with the red, green and blue not just RGB and especially with the red to make sure most of the red is neutralized in the face.

this is what the levels look like

for this gif its not to needed because the lighting is pretty neutral to begin with so I'm mostly using the levels to darken up the imagine and add to the contrast. I yellow up the face a little to make the red in his lips pink up. I will neutralize this later

this is what it looks like rn

VIBRANCE:

next thing I do is grab the vibrancy and up the vibrance to about 50+ and actually a little bit of the saturation to make the colours I already have a little bit extra

CURVES:

same as the levels, I grab the black pipet and choose the darkest part of the image to make sure the contrast is high, for curves I will also use some heavy playing around to sharpen the blacks and whites

dont worry the colours will later be neutralized

this is what the curves look like

this is what it looks like rn

CHANNEL MIXER:

now this part is really different per gifset, here I'm gonna mostly be playing around with the blue to neutralize the colours even more and make the red pop a little more.

here is what they look like

this is what it looks like rn

BRIGHTNESS AND CONTRAST:

because you lose the highlight points when you use channel mixer I'm gonna up the brightness to about +30

SELECTIVE COLOUR:

so this is the fun part, I'm not gonna share all the colours ofc cuz thats 10 pics ajkds, but the red and yellow is the most important here to neutralize the face and make his lips pop, also magenta is really important, the lips almost always have magenta in there so that layer will add even more contrast

here is what they look like

with a gif like this I'd personally recommend upping the blue, blue and red obviously stand in contrast to making the blue stronger with also make the red pop even more

also the white and black are important, white to make eyes pop and black to add contrast and play around further with whatever you think looks pretty

this is what it looks like rn

and yeah, sometimes I do another layer of selective colour to up the red and magenta to make the lips even stronger and the blues brighter which is in technique the same as the last explenation

this is what it looks like rn

and thats it! thats how I basic edit to make specifically someone's lips pop! this works the best with interviews bc they have the most neutral lighting, its hard to do this techique if you first have to fixx the colouring to get it to a basic neutral but its possible just a fuck ton of work.