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I saw a poster advertising a photography exhibition while I was vacationing in Denmark. I snapped a picture of it, because I liked the skin tones of the subjects:

enter image description here

How could one get such a skin tone with their own shots?

Please, don't ask who the artist is. I don't speak Danish and I just took a photo of the poster to ask about it later. I did some googling and it turns out that Svend is the name of the gallery, and I think Fernisering is the name of the show. I don't know which of the artists listed took this photo.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Are you looking for digital or darkroom solutions? \$\endgroup\$
    – steel
    Jan 10, 2018 at 3:28
  • \$\begingroup\$ @steel digital, but I'd also be curious to know darkroom solutions too. \$\endgroup\$
    – user151841
    Jan 10, 2018 at 5:04
  • \$\begingroup\$ If "such a skin tone" means this exact skin tone, I suppose it's possible to get the lighting, development, postprocessing, and printing that contributed to the final image. Otherwise isn't "rich skin tones" too subjective to be answered here? \$\endgroup\$ Jan 10, 2018 at 7:18
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    \$\begingroup\$ This looks like a duotone to me \$\endgroup\$
    – osullic
    Jan 10, 2018 at 7:57

2 Answers 2

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Notice that this photo is not purely black and white. Duotone is the way for better quality in print. When using digital photo, instead of 256 shades of pure black and white you get 256*256=65536 shades. With this technique most ink printers use more than one ink color to print grayscale photos.

Haltone is another method to achieve better result with only black ink.

Beautiful skin tones are better achieved with analog photography, because in analog photo the number of shades is almost infinite.

The same effect is observable in movies shot on film vs most digital cameras. Digitized film movies look softer. A recent quantum dot technology may fix the problem for digital video cameras.

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Digital solution: it seems to me by contrast. By making shadows more dark and lighter parts more light, you get more 'distance' between lighter and darker parts. Btw, in this picture white is more yellowish/grey, because it gives a more older look, but the principle is similar.

Of course it is possible this contrast is differently changed for parts of the picture, especially faces etc. are often postprocessed differently.

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