Remove shine from bald head?

[keithm1972]

Ongoing quest to make this bald musician blend into this old car commercial. This is a passion project, so getting to perfection is a bit of a pipedream, but I'd really like to get some of the shine off that head so it doesn't look like he was just in front of a green screen. Any advice or links to tutorials?

I figure the best place to start is creating a second layer of the musician, drawing a mask around the head, then start doing some Lumetri color stuff to it. But so far I only make the head too dark or too bright in the scene.

[Mylenium]

The simplest way would be to extractr a matte using Shift Channels based on luminance and then use that as an input e.g. for a simple color overlay with a solid that has a suitable color and then play around with blending modes and opacity. The problem here is that there's basically no detail in the white areas and you need to give them a believable skin tone, but not too much. In fact you would likely use another duplicate of  the shiny spot, treat it with Matte Choker and blurs and re-introduce some of the white on top to make it more believable. Point in case: subtlety and balancing out the color is the real trick here, not just color correcting the spot away.

Myelnium

[Rick Gerard]

The actor is moving around in the frame, so you are going to have to use Mocha AE, or even better, Mocha Pro or maybe Lockdown to motion track his head and create an overlay that will stick to his head. Then you are going to have to create a soft edge mask and use some subtle blending to fill in the overexposed area. It may take several captured frames and Photoshop to create a believable overlay. Just fixing that shine in Photoshop is going to require some careful work. 

If you motion track and stabilize the actor's head first, then fix the shine, then put the movement back in the shot, you'll have a better chance of fixing the shot. I would do it on the original shot before you do any keying. Mocha Pro or Lockdown should be able to give you a 3D mesh that will follow the actor's head and give you a chance to create a seamless overlay. I have both. Either one of them would probably work for the job. 

Lockdown 2 for After Effects - aescripts.com

Mocha Pro Power Mesh Workflow:

The tools and workflows are similar, and the results from either solution can be completely belivable.