Fixing skin tone/Lighting help

[The Hams]

hey everybody this is an image i am workin on:
i.imgur.com/kf1Nb.png

can anyone help me alter the girls' skin tones so it looks as though they belong in the same picture? i messed with the hue and saturation of their skin for a while and this was the best i could do. if anyone else has any colorizing/compositional/general advice or comments, they would be much appreciated! thanks!!

[Steve]

Here's the image.

[Furio]

can anyone help me alter the girls' skin tones so it looks as though they belong in the same picture?

The lighting is actually the main issue here. It can be done, but it just requires a little more time and skill to fix.

[ibclare]

I would suggest you try a curves adjustment to make the BG figure a bit brighter then add a warming filter. You may not achieve perfect color match, but bear in mind they do have their own tones. But as stated above, the lighting is the biggest issue. You might experiment with a layer above and paint some highlights on her face, set it to overlay and adjust the opacity. If you try this, and I don't really think it will work very well but worth a shot, use soft brushes at low opacities and use eraser similarly if needed.

That would be my first approach.

[ibclare]

Played with it a bit. The lighting, therefore the quality of the highlights and shadows is very different. Let me know what you think and I can run it down for you if you like.



This a slightly different approach

[The Hams]

Played with it a bit. The lighting, therefore the quality of the highlights and shadows is very different. Let me know what you think and I can run it down for you if you like.

holy jeez thanks!! is it my imagination though or is the girl on the right now a little blurrier than the one on the left? her skin is way better but it seems as though she got blurred up a bit...you can't see the separations between her teeth now, for example.

her skin is just about perfect now though. what technique did you use--the curves adjustment or the painted highlights? i've been work on highlights but haven't been able to make them look natural \:

[The Hams]

your "slightly different approach" pretty much fixes the blurriness. how'd you do that one?

[ibclare]

Actually, there is still a blur and I think it is important to have some blur on both. However, I then painted on the blur mask -- first I made the BG girl's face its own layer and made it a smart object -- to bring the sharpness back to eyes and mouth and here and there ;]. The foreground girl I did the same with selecting, ctl-J, smart obj. Then I did a high pass sharpening -- but any preferred sharpening will do. Then I added a guassian blur and again painted on the blur mask. The sharpening is needed but the main reason for the blur is to bring the highly contrasting highlights down. Makes matching the complexions easier. So back to the darker, BG girl. I used curves a bit more than in the previous example. I then rasterized the layer and added the warming photo filter. I set the opacity at 11%. I didn't add any painting the 2nd time. Pretty easy steps to figure out really, once you've done it a few dozen times! Should be easy for you now.

[The Hams]

thanks C:!!!

[sprucemagoo1]

The quality in picture of the girls was so much lower than the rest of the image, perfection is too much of a mile stone I think.
Here is a different take.