Hello, hope this is the right place to ask this question.
I have had this problem time and time again, not really knowing how to deal with it well. Red skin.
For example its cold and the person i'm taking a photo of has a bright red nose....I am quite good at cloning but a whole nose is a bit too much to deal with. I dont really want to lose the focus ie adding a soft focus to it, and desaturating the area only making it worse, grey and horrible.
I am using elements, pretty much does everything that photoshop does in most cases I think.
Many thanks in advance.
I use cryingdragon's method. Select the area (or use an adjustment layer with mask) and just desat the reds in the affected areas. Works great.
There ya go. That's about the best way to do it.
For what it's worth, I do a slight desat on 90% of the portraits I give to customers. Highly saturated portraits are less appealing than those with a little bit of desat.
I also use a method similar to cryingdragon and strangeghost. I use a mask with a *very* soft edge to limit the effect to the desired area(s), and use a combination of hue/sat (drop reds) and curves to remove excess reds and adjust tones in the selected area(s).
Hue and sat, Levels, curves or channel mixer layer - choose the RED channel and lower it - desaturate it so to speak.
you can use whatever layer you like, they all work about the same. hue and sat will let you teak the hue and channel mixer give you the finest control.
Just be careful if the nose is too red and you desaturate it, it might look a bit weird. Work the hue/sat or possibly even selective color with a wide spread...
This is maybe not the best way to do it, but it worked for me.
I shot raw and ended up with a bunch of skin tones that were a hint on the red side. In PSCS2 Camera Raw......go to the CALIBRATE tab, move the RED HUE slider to the right, and the RED SATURATION slider to the left.
