Here's my take on it:
In my search for a good color palette, I decided to inspect the colors of the hair and skin in photographs of me an my wife. I was quite surprised by the results, so I'd like to her your ideas on this. (Perhaps, to clarify I should add that I am a very pale skinned European and my wife is Asian.)
First of all, even though I know next to nothing about photography, I think that you could get a slightly better idea of the colour of something by just looking at the thing/person itself. Every extra step in the middle is one potential way of warping the results.
- The half tone of my skin is a desaturated and grayish hue of red orange (HSV around: 20 40 80) . When looking at the photograph, I would say my skin is pinkish or whiteish, but that shows that the camera reacts differently than the mind.
This follows what I said above. I'm a Canadian of German and Estonian decent, and looking at my hand right now, the colours of my skin gradient seem to go from a pale yellow, to pink, to brown, to grey. Naturally, any non-white light (such as the light radiating from my computer screen), or light reflected off of colour objects is probably messing with these results. In fact, white light even distorts things. Human skin is slightly translucent, which is why you can see blue veins through your skin and why thin parts of the anatomy (e.g.-fingers), may appear red around the edges when lit brightly from behind. Describing this using a more scientific approach, the phenomenon is called subsurface scattering. The photons travel into your fingers, bounce around a bit, and come back out. Along the way, the frequency of the wave (colour) is being altered by the materials that it bounces off of.
- In normal light circumstances, shadows on the skin have a more orange/yellowish hue (around 25). This is different form what I read before.
The sun is a yellow star, and many lightbulbs give off a slightly yellowish glow. Thus, it follows that everything would be yellower under regular conditions than under pure white light. What you are observing is not the actual colour of your skin, but the colour which it usually appears to be. I would assume that they wouldn't be too different, but the natural light colours would probably be better for a sprite in a realistic world, while the actual colours would be better for characters in a varied and colourful world because they are more average. Just a guess. Anybody else know something about this?
- The human brain seems to use some kind of extreme "jpeg" style compressing when seeing, and the colors of reality into a kind of symbolic colors that are different from reality. I think the brain especially brightens colors. Also, it seems that contrasts are highly simplified in our brain. Hue also seems to be somewhat unreliable, and tied to prejudices in the brain.
The brain has to process a lot of visual information very quickly, so it must compress all of that information somehow. I think that the brain uses colours to identify things, so it naturally picks a colour that seems rather unique to a certain material. I'm guessing that this is usually a more saturated average of all of the colours a substance reflects. As far as the brightening goes, the brain could just be imagining them in a brighter light. I don't really know. This whole paragraph is complete speculation on my part.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject. Hope most of it makes sense. I find it interesting that the colour someone sees is subjective anyway. Some people are colourblind, a rare few see things tetrachromatically, and everyone else still has a slight genetic variation in the number of rods and cones they possess.