What the better way to change color of skin?

[marioav]

Let's imagine that we have a hi-quality photo of human.
How can we change the color of skin but save texture and natural look.

for example look at attached pictures, please.

Thanks for advises!

[Tony W]

Re: What the better way to change color of skin?

I can think of a couple of ways that should work.
1. Add a new layer set blend to Colour and paint over skin tones with your desired colour.
2. Use a mask for skin area on a Curves layer again set for colour.

You may find it helpful to do a search for colouring a B&W photograph even though you are likely to be working in colour in the first instance the same principles should apply

[MacBurg]

Re: What the better way to change color of skin?

Another option is converting to Lab Mode and inverting either of the a or b colour channels, then use a hue/sat layer to change the hue to suit. Gives very "natural" looking results but you need to mask out any areas you don't want affected.

The black images are really well done, I'm thinking this is more to do with make up on the models, not to such a full effect, but again working with channels to further darken the tones in post.

[Crapaud]

Re: What the better way to change color of skin?

Another option is converting to Lab Mode and inverting either of the a or b colour channels, then use a hue/sat layer to change the hue to suit. ...

Paint me stupid (joke:-D), but what is the point of inverting a channel? I tried it, but couldn't see any advantage to either setting a colour in Lab or a hue/sat layer on it's own.

You could also use a Selective Colour layer.

[MacBurg]

Re: What the better way to change color of skin?

Not a huge difference but as per photoshop there's many ways to achieve the same thing, so it was worth mentioning as an option. Inverting a colour channel in Lab mode seems to respect saturation values better than say just using a Hue/Sat layer when making a large hue change. Actually I'd usually just use a gradient map for this!

[marioav]

Re: What the better way to change color of skin?

yes, gradient map is great way to change skin color if you change it to something similar (ex. - pink to orange or brown to chocolate, etc.)

but if I wanna totally change to absolutely different color — white to black, like on my attachments above. It needs more delicate, isn't it?

I have tried color mode but it looks fake.

[DJSoulglo]

Re: What the better way to change color of skin?

to black or white, the way to go is Lab. Convert and make your open a curve, flatten the line for your A&B channel, it's pretty awesome.

[Siciliana]

Re: What the better way to change color of skin?

This shouldn't be hard to do. I just experimented a few ways. The first one I tried in LAB, just like Soulglo said. I created a curves adjustment layer in which I evened out the color channels and pulled down the curve in the luminosity channel. That is the first back image. The last black image attached achieves the same effect but was created by two adjustment layers instead of one. A hue/sat layer to reduce the saturation and a curves layer to darken the tones. Again, I put the curve layer on darken mode.

As for the color, like superman, that is easy too. The trick is that you need to desaturate under the color, so that the underlying skin color does not interact with your color. I don't think you want 100% desaturation... a little skin color blending in will make it more authentic, but just a little. Then, the color layer can be painted on in overlay mode. Keep in mind that overlay darkens if you paint with greater then 50% black and lightens if you paint with lighter, so if you use yellow, to paint, you need to pull the black slider down in the HSB slider, to get the look of a yellow paint. I think this method looks more realistic then painting in color mode. The middle link is painted in this way but you can see I forgot to mask out the eyes when I desaturated... whoops!

[Siciliana]

Re: What the better way to change color of skin?

Here is how the color looks when you do not desaturate underneath and simply paint in overlay mode... it is fun too