How to acheive "exact" skin tone using Photoshop CS5

[blasteralfred]

Hi,
I am "somewhat" beginner to Photoshop, means I have some experience with it. I use Photoshop CS5 Extended.
If I want to change some skin tone, usually I go through some usual settings like levels, hue/saturation, brightness/contrast and finally curves. This always does it for me. But now, what I am telling is something different, like to achieve some "exact" or "accurate" skin tone, that I require using Photoshop. Even if I can mess with all those settings I mentioned, is there any other simpler way? I found it "really" hard to do this sometimes. When some settings works, something else wont, makes me to compromise the perfection of result. I think you got what I am telling about.
Below are 2 images. I would like to get skin tones swapped, or I would like to change the skin tone of any one photo with the other.
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Is this possible? If there is no solution, is there any work around or tutorial at lest, to achieve specific skin tone?
Thanks in advance..

 

[Tom Mann]

Over the past 5 or 10 years, the same thought / wish has also crossed my mind and I've looked into various approaches such as:

a) Pick a representative area on both images (eg, the cheeks of both subjects) sample the color over a large area (eg, 50 x 50 pixels), and read off the two sets of RGB values. Then, put a "curves" adjustment layer above the image that you want to change, and manually type in the before and after values into all three curves.

b) Image / Adjust / Match Color

c) A 3rd party plugin: "ReColorST" by FoksMarx ( http://foksmarx.com/ ).

To be honest, I'm not happy with any of the above approaches. These semi-automated methods somewhat work, but they usually introduce artifacts and regions with terrible color. I usually wind up using a manual, ad hoc method, such as what you described. Of the three listed above, probably the first is the least bad / most reliable, but it still isn't very good. :-(

Sorry I can't be more encouraging.

If you find something semi-automated that works well, pls. let me know.

Tom

 

[Icarus]

using a layer above with the blending mode set to soft light can work well, you can also adjust the colour to that newly made layer using a hue/saturation adjustment layer. On this new layer, using a soft brush with low opacity, you can apply tone nicely

 

[Icarus]

like so

 

[Icarus]

or

 

[ALB68]

As far a caucasion skin goes, this is about what it should be based on CMYK values. I use a rule of your M value being say 30, then your Y should be approximately 8-10% more or 33. You Cyan value should be approximately 1/2 of the average of the 2, I use 15. Your looking for a quick way to do this, I did the change in Nik Vivesa2 in about 2 minutes. Got called to dinner on the other one, but you can use Vivesa to pick the color and what you want to change it to.

Also, try making those adjustments in ACR. ACR does wonderful things and you might not even need to take some of your images into Photoshop. I have my preferences set to open all Jpgs and Tiffs in ACR before opening in PS.