white skin to black skin?

[Anne Hedonia]

Hi all.

I'm playing with some graphics to advertise a friend's one-person show, which deals with race. A very important (and joyous) point in her show is when a black man plays the piano. I've found a great picture of a man's hand playing a piano - which I've attached - but the hand in the picture is white. It seems like it should be totally possible to change the skin color in Photoshop 7.0, which I have, but I really don't know how to make it happen. Could anyone offer a tutorial?

Thanks in advance for any help,
Anne

[philbach]

Your Photo seems to have a very high contrast and the highlights on the top of the hand are "blown Out." So if this were a black pianist, there would be very little color either. Perhaps this is what you want. If not you may want to select another photograph to start with.

In this case I copied the hand to a new layer and toned it down some and colorized it.

[Ken Fournelle]

How about re-shooting with the hand of a person of color?

[Cyber Cat]

here is what i did.
1 copy background (lets call it BG2)
2 on BG2 layer adjust brightness/contrast
3. on BG2 layer adjust hue/saturation (check colorize)
4. copy BG2 layer couple of times and give all of those layers multiply mode
5. merge all exept original layer
6. so now you should have original and BG2
7 apply mask on BG2 layer

[Cassidy]

Great going Cyber Cat, especially as the image is so overblown

[Anne Hedonia]

Thanks Cyber Cat, but I'm afraid I'm not the expert you are - could you tell me to what settings you adjusted everything? I won't know how to do it on my own.

In answer to the question of why I don't just reshoot it - I didn't shoot it in the first place. I was trying to see if it could be done with an existing free image. I'm not much of a photographer, and I was still just experimenting, and I was just interested to see if it could be done.

Thanks for everyone's help and interest.

[edgework]

The problem with this image is the blasted out highlight. Genuine black skin tones probably would not have taken on such a glare.

After using a gradient map to bring the tones into a believable range, the healing brush provided the missing texture in the center areas.

[Duv]

Perhaps the secret lies in Adjustments:Invert and coloring in Blue Black or Dark Brown.

Dave

[Anne Hedonia]

Wow, Duv, that's kind of amazing. I'm going to keep that photo, with your permission.

[Duv]

Hi Anne

Just Paypal me $150, my standard fee..just jokin..enjoy!

Dave