I'm doing some free time retouching and want to know how to get the almost pure, white skin with a hint of red color...
I haven't pictures her...only a vogue magazine I've been looking at and there is some pictures there that has this effect...

So here is my questions:

How do I turn down the color of the original skin? I've been messing around with desaturation and taking down opacity, but the skin get's abit grey...I want it white. adding the red back wouldn't give me any problems i think...

If this is a repost of some sort please post the link! I have searched for threads here, but nothing came up!

Try duplicating the layer, and setting the layer mode to screen. If the skin is still too dark, repeat. If it is now to light, lower the opacity.

If there is still too much color, instead of duplicating the layer, add a black&white adjustment layer, and do the same thing. Add a normal layer also set to screen or a hue adjustment layer set to color to bring some color back.

I'm not sure what you are going for, but one of these methods should get you started. :)

the skin is not light enough... It's a fine line between pale and gray.

the fast/lazy method would be to tweak the color with hue&sat or selective color (where you can target the color you are tweaking) and then lighten with curves or whatever. if there is red/yellow elsewhere in the image, then some approximate masking would have to be done.

more precise method would be to mask the skin area precisely and then use "global" corrections on it, for example to lower the saturation with hue&sat master and lighten and "colorize" with curves.

I don't know how "white" you are trying to achieve but here's an approach. I duplicated the background layer and added a layer mask for the skin. I then took a copy of the red channel and pasted it on top with opacity of 65% and blending mode of normal. This approach seems to avoid the "gray" look of de-saturation.

Use Hue SAT to destaturate red or magenta areas.

You can also use Curve Adj layers to take out cyan in the darker areas

Use a colour overlay to "paint" on colour then lower opacity

thanks for the replies! I've come up with the idea is to paint with white on a soft light layer...then mask out everything besides the skin and add some weak red or pinkish color...I can't post any picture until I have spoken to the photographer...

okey, by using a softlight layer and painting it with white I get fake white feel and it doesn't look natural...and using the hue/sat layer gives me again a greyish feel...maybe I'm painting with wrong layer blend mode? using the color layer to paint white I also get grey...