Wanting to match skin tones and nothing works as advertised

Hi, I realize photoshop is extremely complicated, but I hope somebody can give me advice that works.

I want to do face swaps and match skin tone. Sounds easy, but every tutorial I've tried runs into old options that aren't available in the new version. There's a match color option even, but it's never available on the layer I want to adjust. There seems no reason, since I have it already in RGB (the only thing the help page says would stop me).

I will follow the instruction, right to the point of selecting the layer I want to adjust, then Image>Adjustments>Match color, but "Match color" is greyed out.

I try doing it the other way, where I take the image I didn't want to change, and try to change it anyway, since the "match color" is not greyed out. However, performing the change doesn't do anything visible.

I wonder if the image I want to change is a smart object, does that matter? the help section doesn't address this. It only lists RGB mode as a reason to have that option greyed out.

Even if I rasterize the smart object, which brings the menu item back so I can choose "match color", however, there is no change when I click OK, no matter what I do with the sliders.

I'm very frustrated, because I've watched several videos on matching skin tones, and they must be old versions of Photoshop or something, becasue they will get to a point where they say, "click on this feature" and they click something I don't have on my screen.

Right now, the best I can do is open both photos in ACDsee and quickly adjust them until they look pretty close to each other, then drop them into facebook to combine the images with a mask.

There must be a way, without installing an older version of photoshop, to make skin tones match. Please help.

Thank you in advance.