If you tend to create lots of crazy self-portraits as I do, a good technique to know is how to quickly change skin tone in Photoshop. Like the above image, one of my favorite things is to turn people into zombies. If you work for me its only a matter of time before you are in front of the camera, ready to be zombified!
The trick is to start with the skin color and work it from there. It doesn’t end at skin color, though; you will need putrid veins, wrinkles and any other little details that will add to the effect but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s crack on with the tutorial!
Open your image into Photoshop. Here is my before image.
As you can see I shot against a gray background. Always try to match your background to the mood of the image. Once your image is open in Photoshop, you will want to create a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Which can be found here in your adjustment layer icons on the left side of the scales.
Once the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer box is open, click on the handpicker icon and move your cursor over the image.
A color picker should appear. All you have to do now is select the part you want to change the color of. As we are trying to change the skin color, you click on the face. As soon as you do that, there will be some changes in the Hue/Saturation box.
The 2nd drop box will change from master to reds, as that is the color range of the skin, and a slider will appear at the bottom which will play with soon. Your skin color range is now selected, so all you have to do is slide the hue slider at the top of the box to whichever color you desire.
I wanted green obviously so I slid the slide till my skin tone changed to green. I went for a paler green.
Now we have the skin color we want, it’s now time to refine a little as the image color looks too fake. Remember that slider at the bottom, well now we have a little play with that.
This slider works a little like the blend-if slider once you separate the black or white blend-if triangle into two. My aim here is to bring a little red back into the green for a more realistic feel skin feel. So all I did was push the far left slider in a little to the right. I then pushed the next slider a little too the left. This is a technique that I usually do by eye. Once the skin is refined, it should look a little like this.
The skin now has some little flecks of red back in it, which I believe adds an element of realism to the color change.
And that is it. Short but sweet. How to quickly change the skin color of a person. Obviously, this isn’t where I finished with the editing, so I will post various stages of editing below which led to the final image
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