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We take a lot of pictures with our son, and he has really great skin color. The problem is, when my wife and I are in pictures with him, we always come out looking sunburned while he looks great. Luckily, there’s a quick and easy fix in Photoshop that just gets quicker with a little practice.

You can use this technique in all sorts of ways, but one of the most useful I’ve found is for correcting the skin tone of a portrait subject. For example, you can count on someone getting themselves actually sunburned while everyone else looks fine at least once in your photography days. Here’s how to fix it.

Step 1 - Create a Color Balance adjustment layer. After opening the file in Photoshop, go down to the layers palette and click the icon that’s a half black, half white circle. This pops up a menu for adjustment layers. Choose “Color Balance…”.

Adjustment layer menu

When the Color Balance dialog box opens, play with the sliders to get the skin fixed. At this stage you’re only paying attention to the problem areas. As you’re adjusting the sliders and the problem subject starts to look better, everyone else will look worse. But that’s okay, because in the next couple steps we’ll isolate the fix to just the problem subject. To fix red skin, just move the first two sliders away from red and magenta.

Color Balance dialog

Step 2 - Fill the adjustment layer with black. So now you have two layers: the image layer and the adjustment layer. Make sure you have the adjustment layer selected and go to the “Edit” menu and choose “Fill…”. When the dialog opens, fill the whole layer with black and hit OK.

Adjustment layer mask thumbnail

Step 3 - Paint in the effect. What we’re going to do here is to tell Photoshop what parts of the adjustment layer are to show through and what aren’t. You have the ability to “paint in” the adjustment to whatever parts of the image you want. Anything that is black means the adjustment doesn’t take effect. Anything white shows the effect. Shades of gray in between show varying amounts of the effect. Now that the layer is all black, we’ll just paint white in over my skin, so that the color correction only applies to my skin and not to any other part of the image.

Adjustment layer mask

So using the brush tool, simply paint white onto the areas that need color correction. As you paint you’ll see the skin turn from red to a nice natural color. If you stray outside the skin area, just touch it up with black to remove the effect. To see how you’re doing, you can view the adjustment layer mask by alt-clicking (or command-clicking on Mac) on the little black and white mask thumbnail on the layer palette, shown above.

When you alt-click on the mask thumbnail, the whole image will be replaced with the black and white mask so you can adjust it that way.

Watch the eyes and mouth. Notice that I’ve left the color correction effect off of the eyes and I’ve applied it lightly to the mouth. Taking the red off makes the color a little more yellow, and the last thing anyone wants is yellow eyes and yellow teeth! Also, lips should keep a little of their pink color; yellow lips don’t look so good either!

The Final Product - At the end of the process, here’s what I ended up with. The redness was removed from my face and neck, and the rest of the image is untouched.

Final image

Once you’ve done this technique a couple of times to fix photos, you’ll find that it’s a really fast and easy fix. If I hadn’t been taking screen shots for this article, this photo would have taken me around 60 seconds to fix. Give it a try the next time you find that someone or something in one of your pictures just seems a little out of place color wise.