If you are wanting to change the skin tone of a subject what is the best way to select the skin - especially in full body shots where you have to get inbetween the clothes, jewellery etc

Depending on how much alteration the skin requires, one quick simple method would be to make a Selective Color layer and alter the Reds (Method: Absolute). Adding magenta will make the skin redder, adding yellow will make it yellower, etc etc.... If you do this on a layer you can quickly brush away any areas that you don't want touched with a layer mask.

Photoshop

i have my methods but just wondeing if anybody has a more efficient one :classic:

I did her this way and have a crop of the job. I did this in PhotoImpact, though, and I made a Lasso selection (4 pixel edge) of the face and partial neck area then adjusted her skin tones to darker tan through the "Style" mechanism.

I'm not sure I understand your problem but it sounds like a question of how to do the selection. I generally use Quick Mask for this type of selection and copy the results to a separate layer or create a Layer Mask. Maybe I'm missing something in your question.

duwayne - see how yu have not included the skin under her hair on her forehead. i would normally go in and intrically paint the mask in there as there is not much colour definition between her hair and skin - just wondering if their is a more effecient/easier way

Sometimes the only way to get a good mask of certain areas is to just bite the bullet and paint a mask. You can try channel mixing to get a decent selection of the harder areas and then finish it off with painted mask.

Well a lot of this photo was fairly easy to do with the pen tool. Yeah it took a while. Around the hair I used selective color. Then I added the two alpha channels together to combine them to one selection