Half of face in projector light... any way to edit skin to look normal?

[carefoun]

Was asked to edit a photo where someones face is covered partly by the projector light. I'm trying to make the skin look natural as possible but it's not looking right. I'm not sure if this is a lost cause or if there is a way to make it look better. Any help/advice would be great! Photo quality isn't the best either, which is making things more difficult but was curious to see if anything could be done.

[Martin_Bns · Accepted solution]

Hi there, if the issue is only the color, there are a lot of tools in order to achieve what u are looking for.
What you need to understand is what you want to achieve:

1. On one side you have more brownish and dark look
2. On the other you have a more pinkish and light look
3. You must be able to isolate one are of color and change it, usually done via masking

This means you have to use some tools which can change the tones and the colors.

Depending on your skill level you can go very in depth and obtain a very natural look. If you are a novice, i suggest to use the Eyedropper tool in order to select the Pink correct color. Thank Create a new layer and change it's blending mode to COLOR. Now paint with a very soft brush the color over the dark wrong color of the skin and you will see how the color will become more uniform.

You can paint also over the correct side of the skin in order to paint over the whole skin and remap the skin tone.

You will see some difference in brightness. In order to correct that you have to create a Levels layer and once masked the dark area, adjust the brightness.

It can be tricky if you are a beginner. Please let me know if you will manage to achieve what you need.
My intent is to give you the easiest way to do what you need without to much headache.

Cheers,
Martin

[carefoun]

This helped a lot! Thank you! Would you recommend the same method for removing the letters?

[Chuck Uebele]

I would say your best bet would be to retouch it using frequency separation, where you can edit the details and the color separately. Google the process, there are a lot of good tutorials on it.

[joanH]

Hi Chuck Uebele, If you do not own photoshop and the wonderful tools for retouching, I can not offer more. The Spot Healing brush and Clone stamp are great for this kind of thing. Take your time, set the saturation at about 50% and begin a bit at a time while you have the photo on your artboard at 100%. You will see the edges of the lighter words that need clearing out. Do not set the size of the tool more than 10 and do not set hardness at all, keep it soft. Make sure you have it set on content aware also. Best of luck. Also look at UTube for tutorials on how to do this by Adobe. JH