Making Abnormal Skin Tones

Hello once again,

Last week someone asked how to change skin colors so that’s what this week is.

Here’s the photo I started with.

First off that pink is way to bright so I’m going to turn the saturation down on it.

Using the Hue/Saturation option in the Adjustments window will let me do this just to the pink of her dress.

To do this, I used the drop down to select the Magenta hues, then used the slider to turn the saturation down.

And this same tool will allow us to change skin colors too.

Skin generally falls into the Red hues option.

You can use the saturation and lightness sliders together to change natural tones.

If you want an unnatural tone like say, green or blue, instead you can use the Hue slider to completely change the color.

To keep this from spreading to other areas of the photo that might also be Red, it’s best to select the general area of the skin first.

It can always be cleaned up afterwards.

Here, it has gone onto her hair.

So for that, you can use a layer mask.

With the mask, black paint will take away the blue that’s been added, and white paint will put it back.

Then just use that to clean up the blue.

Make sure you have the layer mask selected instead of the actual layer.

And now we have a little Smurfette.

Now I’m just going to keep selecting little bits and pieces I want to change the color of until I think it looks right.

And I end up with a little alien girl, or maybe young Mystique.

As always, if there’s something you’d like me to talk about, let me know.

Today I’ll leave you with a really cool music video for Gotye’s song “Bronte”.