How to change color reflected from clothing onto skin tones

Question

The scarf in this photo used to be a very intense red. To change it, in Photoshop, i selected it and colorized and fine-tuned final color in Hue/Saturation/Brightness.

As you can see, there are refections of the original color along her jawline. I can't even begin to think of how to go about adjusting that reflected color to match that of the new scarf color (whatever it may be).

I think it would be far easier to just remove it altogether, but being that the photographer of the stock photo made what seems like a conscious decision to leave it in the original, I feel I should probably do the same.

Can anyone point m in the right direction?

Answer 1

The Colour Replacement Tool can kill the red. It can't really replace it with a blue cast quite so easily. I had a quick go at airbrushing it in, but it wasn't going to work for me.

Using a sample from elsewhere on her face, this was done in one big brush stroke…

Answer 2

Insert a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Adjust it to turn the red reflection to turquoise. That's possible by adjusting the color range of the adjustment layer. See "reds" and quite narrow hue range in my adjustment dialog.

Put to the layer mask at first a sharp white dot on black at the strongest reflection area. Adjust the hue/saturation sliders until the bright red reflection is as bright turquoise.

Make the effect more subtle by doing the next tweaks until it's good enough:

• paint to the mask in turns black and white with a soft low opacity brush; start from fully black mask.
• make the opacity of the hue/saturation layer lower
• apply Gaussian blur to the mask to fade too sharp bush stroke borders.

Watch it again after keeping your eyes elsewhere say 5 minutes. It's very easy to leave too much turquoise because the eyes adapt themselves and distort the color perception.

There was some red on the upper cheek caused by rouge cosmetics. For me it looked excessive with this new scarf, so I reduced it, too. But that's an opinion only. By zooming in you see that there's still some red spots here and there. They need work with smaller brush (black&white to the mask).

This method is fully manual and can feel painful if one is in hurry. For some automation you can clip from the original image all but the red scarf to a new layer (=work like the scarf was the background). "remove color contamination" is now available in Photoshop and numerous other programs and it compensates more or less the red reflection. Then you can insert the colorized scarf back.

Answer 3

There are lots of ways to do this. Another one is to use a Selective Colour adjustment layer to adjust the reds, by adding more cyan, and reducing magenta and yellow, then a mask on the adjustment to target specific areas.