removing shadow from bride-to-be's face

[uladee]

Hi everyone! I've looked through your forums for tips on removing shadows from photos but they aren't quite working on this picture. I love this photo, and so does the bride-to-be, but we can't figure out what's up with this strange shadow on the left side of her face, near her eye. It's not in any other photo I took. I'd really like to salvage this image for her, if possible. Any ideas or tips for me? Thanks in advance!

[mistermonday]

Was the photographer shooting RAW or jpg? If it was RAW, then it was likely missed processed by whoever edited the RAW file. If it was jpg out of the camera, then the camera made some guesses and didn't do a great job. If you zoom in you will observe that the "shadow" is not only under her left eye but all over her nose and elsewhere but not nearly as pronounced. All your skin is cyanotic and there is a lot of cyan (blue) in the lady's hair. Finally if you check the histogram you will see that all 3 channels are badly clipped at the dark end.
Option 1: Locate the RAW file if it exists and process it properly with a RAW converter or Photoshop. You should be able to recover most if not all the info or at least be able to avoid the key problems.
Option 2: If only the jpg is available, I would start by adding an Curves adj layer and correcting the color imbalance (I have attached an adjustment indicating what I think the skin color should look more like). Next I would add a Dodge layer to brighten the shadow areas. This will probably take you 15-30 mins. Finally I would add a color correction layer above the dodge layer to fix the color of the dodged areas.
Hopefully Option 1 is available to you.
Regards, Murray

[chillin]

If Murray's option isn't available, you could use frequency separation & correct the tones with curves on the low frequency layer. The high frequency layer use to repair the texture.

[uladee]

I do have the RAW files! Thank you so much!