Photoshop Tutorials

Whether altering a person's skin color to situate them in a new environment better, or to completely change the look of their race, recoloring skin tones in a fun and challenging step in photo manipulation. In this tutorial, I'll go the dramatic route of altering a woman's race completely for effect.

Final Result Preview

Extract the area to color

First, I wanted to extract the areas of the image I wanted to recolor. In this case, all the exposed skin. Using the Lasso Tool, I roughly selected the figure from the image and pasted it onto a new layer. Then, I went in with the Eraser Tool selected to clean off the edges leaving just the skin remaining.

Remove pinkish tones

I wanted to change her skin color to a darker tone, so I needed to first remove some of the pinkish hue from her skin and drop the saturation level slightly. I selected the Hue & Saturation menu from the Image tab to pull up the Hue & Saturation menu. I moved the Hue slider to the right by 15, and dropped the Saturation by -30.

Paint in the new color

To darken her skin and give it some new color, I created a new layer over the woman. I selected the Paintbrush Tool and set the foreground color of my brush to a darker brown tone. With the Paintbrush set at 100% Alpha, I painted directly over the woman on my new layer.

Set layer to Multiply and clean up edges

I set this layer's blend mode to Multiply and lowered the Alpha of this layer to 70% on the layer palette. Then, using the Eraser Tool set at 100% Alpha and 85% Hardness, I removed all the excess areas not directly on my figure's skin.

Correct the highlights

This darkened the figure's skin tone, but left a flat appearance to her. In order to fix this problem, I needed to blow out the highlights.

I did this by selecting my original image layer again, and clicking the Options menu on the layers palette and selected the Duplicate Layer option. I dragged the duplicated layer to the top of my layers palette. I selected Levels under the Image tab.

In the Levels menu, I slid the midtone slider to the right to about the 185 mark to deepen the dark areas of the image, then slid the White Point slider (slider on the furthest right) to the left to around the 225 mark to blow out the highlights in the image then clicked Ok to apply the changes.

I then dropped the Contrast on the image by about 15 points and dropped the Saturation by 60, applied the Hard Light blend mode to this layer and dropped the Alpha to 55%.

Highlight even more with Paintbrush

To further accentuate the highlights, I used the Paintbrush Tool set to white and painted over the existing highlights in areas such as around the figure's cheek and neck, over her lip, lightly on her cheeks, and on the tip of her nose. I set this layer's blend mode to Overlay.

Add back some pink to the lips

I wanted to bring back some of the pink tone from her original lips back into the image as well.

I selected my original image again, and made a rough selection around her mouth with the Lasso Tool, then copied and pasted this selection onto a new layer. I dragged this layer on the layers palette so it was the uppermost layer.

Using the Eraser Tool set at 50% Hardness, I removed the edges of her face from this layer isolating her lips. I then set this layer's Alpha to 30% and this gave my figure's lips a pink hue to them. Then applied the same process to her eyelids.

Update the background for effect

At this point, you could call the image complete. But for an added element, I clicked the options menu on the layers palette and selected the Flatten Layers option. This merges my entire image into a single layer.

I removed the white background from this merged layer with the Eraser Tool. I selected File > Import Image and imported my new background into the image and dragged it underneath my merged layer. I then applied a slight blur of 5 points to both the X and Y axes to add a sense of depth.

Note: If you want to flatten the layers in your image but afraid to lose your layered working file, flatten your image, then press Select > Select All, then Edit >Copy. This copies the flattened layer onto our clipboard. Then, press the Undo button until you've reverted back to your full layered file. Press Edit > Paste to paste the copied flatten image onto a new layer over the rest of the document. This will give you the flattened image to work with, while maintaining all your layers underneath.