Fix red area on skin

[petersweden]

Hi

I have a area of skin that has redness on it (mostly in the area circles in green). I have tried changing saturation, hue and lightness but I am struggling to get a good result. Any ideas on how to fix it?

[petersweden]

Re: Fix red area on skin

File without green circles attached in this post.

[John Wheeler]

Re: Fix red area on skin

Here is one approach assuming Photoshop
- Convert to Smart Object
- Add Camera Raw Filer
- Adjust Red luminance much higher
- Adjust Red saturation a bit lower
-Save Smart Ojbect
- Invert Filter Mask to all black
- Paint in white in Filter Mask where reduced red is desired
- Done

[skoobey]

Re: Fix red area on skin

All of that or make a new layer with it's blending mode set to color, and just paint in the color from surrounding areas.

[klev]

Re: Fix red area on skin

I would use a layer mask and selective color or color balance to match it to the surrounding areas. Alternatively (or to touch up small details), you can use a layer set to color mode and clone stamp. John Wheeler's method is likely to add more to the file size, and I usually avoid that.

[petersweden]

Re: Fix red area on skin

Thanks for great suggestions, very helpful.

I would also like to change her hair color. Quick selection works well except for by her shoulder where some hairs are in front of the skin. I tried select color range but I have a hard time not pickung up some of the skin at the same time.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[skoobey]

Re: Fix red area on skin

You can't mask by color if the color is the same (red), you have to make a luminosity mask, and even those can be patchy, so you might have to do some manual tweaking with a brush.

[John Wheeler]

Re: Fix red area on skin

Thanks for great suggestions, very helpful.

I would also like to change her hair color. Quick selection works well except for by her shoulder where some hairs are in front of the skin. I tried select color range but I have a hard time not pickung up some of the skin at the same time.

Any ideas?

Thanks

If you like the most of the selection you get by using Select > Color Range, just turn the selection into a Layer Mask and then paint black on the Layer Mask those areas you want to deselect. Just one of many approaches.

[klev]

Re: Fix red area on skin

Any ideas?

Hair can be tough. I always have terrible results with the auto selection tools. Every time I use them, I spend too much time cleaning the results. I get better results just masking it out from scratch. If some small strands can't be believably masked due to being only semi transparent, I clone them out, redo them, or just use a very rough mask and some amount of color correction. Anything that makes them look as if they belong there works for me.

[Tony W]

Re: Fix red area on skin

Another approach for major colour changes is to use Lab rather than RGB - best to use on 16 bit files. Just change the a and b values will affect colour and leave luminosity alone. Then using the blend if sliders you may find that there is very little masking work to be done

Very quick example changing hair colour below - needed a little more masking but you should get the general idea.