Hard time with 'plastic looking' skintones

[Ted Bragg]

How does one expose for caucasian skintones without them turning all plastic looking? I only have a 50mm 1.8 to work with and no extra lights, just interior restaurant lights...

[Roger Shealy]

Avoiding the plastic look can be tough. I use the 7D and t2i and have the Canon 50mm f1.8 as well as other glass and strangely enough a lot of the work we do is in restaurants. Here are some thoughts :

1. Avoid oily skin. When shooting interviews I try to have the subject wipe their face before I start shooting. This is easier on guys than gals with makeup.

2. Close-ups or distant shots look better than intermediate distances. There seems to be a bad spot between a tight close-up (face totally fills the frame or tighter) and at a distance (torso and head fills the frame or longer) where Canon's processing erases detail you know should be there but isn't. A little closer and the detail appears, a little wider and you don't miss it. Perhaps there are just some non-ideal distances where bad things happen. I've even seen some extreme close-ups where the subject's pores looked unusual, but in other shots in same piece at slightly different distances, things looked good. Perhaps the line-skipping/processing on these sensors has certain thresholds that don't resolve well (?).

3. Try lighting and shooting f4 or higher. Keeping the entire face in focus helps with detail and provides a little grace with focus.

4. On subjects with highlights, try slightly underexposing the darker areas versus overexposing the highlights. Once you burn out the skin, you're toast and correcting slight underexposure is easier in post than overexposure.

5. We often use small LED lights, but whenever possible we take folks into the dining area with natural lighting to help light them.

[Charles Papert]

After a lot of time with the Canon DSLR's, I came to the conclusion that both the 7D and 1D are more prone to this phenomenon than the 5D.

Best ways to avoid this, in my unscientific experience:

Don't overexpose faces (or anything, really). Keep the skintones at or under "key".
Don't fix green casts with the internal green/magenta correction of the camera. Adding magenta, even when the scene dictates it, seems to play havoc with certain skintones. It seems to be help to make the correction later, with decent CC software.
Avoid keying with LED lights. Much as I love their simplicity, cool running and low power requirements, I've come to accept that they don't provide the full color spectrum required for the best looking skintones. Use quality fluorescent units or better yet, tungsten.
As a rule, I found that ruddy, "Irish" skintones with a lot of pink/magenta in them are going to read the most plastic. On the other end of the spectrum, I've had plenty of success with African-American skin tones and these cameras. But of course, you shoot what is put in front of you, so that's neither here nor there.

[Ted Bragg]

Thanks everyone. I'll try shooting at f4 -- I've been at 1.8-2.0 since it's so dark in the rooms. Go with higher ISO/lower shutter...