Tanning help

[Jay McLaughlin]

I'm currently trying to paste the head of one person onto another's body, however, the new body is a lot more tanned. How can I match the skin tones as for some reason, despite being able to match most other colours I can't seem to turn a pasty pink face into a bronzed beauty!

[greyghost]

Have you tried Color Balance in Photoshop? A lot of times I can get things like that to work with that.

[Jay McLaughlin]

Yeah and levels etc.

For some reason it's hard to get the right brown

[DesignerScott]

The other option I can think of right now (granted it is 4 in the morning) is to desaturate the image and then use the "colorize" hue-saturation setting using a nice yellow/orange.
Let us know what you end up doing, and I always love visuals...

[Jay McLaughlin]

That's what I did in the end anyway.

I was being lazy before and couldn't be arsed cut round the body

[LeftBrain Artist]

You might want to try making a new layer on top of the face, filled with a solid color where ever you want to darken the skin tones. Start with a color like C-30, M-50, Y-100, K-0 – Set this layer mode to "Color" or "Multiply" and reduce its opacity to between 5% and 40%. Play around then with the base color to match the skin tones of the body. Cut out holes for the eyes, lips (and possibly teeth), create a mask and using a 30% opacity airbrush, feather out some areas a bit to make the tanning mask a bit more realistic (where exactly that would be would depend on the subject's lighting).

Its a pain in the neck, but this method of color alteration works pretty well as it gives you more control (with layer modes and opacity) than just performing a color balance shift or adjusting the Curves of the individual channels.

[MRCHRISTOPHER13]

You can trying playing with the CMYK Color Channels in Photoshop. Select a single channel, say Y, then adjust the Levels to bring down the warm tones then repeat until you find the color tone to match. good luck! :)