Today’s 30 Days of Aviary Tip: Changing Skin Tone

Skin tone is a surprisingly difficult thing to work with in image manipulation. Because humans can very easily pick up on subtle “problems” with a person’s face, so the window in which a picture looks “right” is much more narrow when dealing with things like altered skin tone. Luckily, we have this great tutorial on skin tone altering which should help you through it.

The first step is to select all the exposed skin with the lasso tool. Next, you’ll need to desaturate the skin and make it less pink—the paler it is, the easier it will be to apply a new color. Do this by slightly adjusting the saturation and slightly sliding the hue to the left. Don’t make it TOO grey, just make it as pale as you can without hitting the uncanny valley, you still need the natural tones to blend with the new color.

Now you should paint the intended skin color on a new layer within your original selection of the subject’s skin. Change this layer’s Blend Mode to “Multiply” to make the color bleed into the photo below… But you’ll notice, the highlights look weird.

To correct the highlights, make a copy of your original image and go to the “Levels” tool and lower the midtones and raise the highlights. Then go to Brightness & Contrast and boost the contrast. Now change that layer’s Blend Mode to “Hard Light” to blend it’s highlights with the original image. You can also create a new layer above the picture and paint on highlights using the Paint Tool on a new layer with the Overlay Blend Mode.

Basically you have to remember that the darkness of skin also affects the way the skin reflects light, and when you change one aspect of the skin, you’ll have to also change the other or else the subject can start to look unnatural. If you use this effect on any of your creations, let us see, and we’ll post your work here!

Tagged: 30 Days of Aviary