best method to select skin?

[aussie]

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

[drsuess]

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.

[aussie]

ps

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

[maureeno]

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.

[duwayne]

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.

[aussie]

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

[drsuess]

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.

[philbach]

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