How to eliminate the white highlights?

Question

How do I tone down the extreme white that shows up along the side of his neck, his ear, and on his knuckles? Adjusting the contrast doesn't seem to help.

EDIT:

(Some background information on what I've tried)

I tried:

Like mentioned above, adjusting the contrast and brightness. No luck.

Then, I selected the brush tool, selected the "color dodge" mode (on the panel at the top of the screen), however, it affected nearby pixels.

Using the color replacement tool lead to a similar result.

I read somewhere that you should try using levels or curves, but it when I tried the first time, it didn't work for me. I was adjusting the position of the gray, white and black swatches underneath the histogram, but that didn't help. Jagged black outlines grew around the white highlights when I tried to adjust the white to a grayer color.

In desperation, I even tried putting a grey cut out the same shape as the man in a layer beneath, and tried painting dark grey onto the mask I applied on the top layer. Again, other pixels became grayer too.

However, thanks to all the comments suggesting levels/curves, I figured I was doing it wrong. On my second try, it worked. (Instead of the swatches, I shifted the a slider on a palette, and the white was toned down to grey.)

Answer 1

There are many solutions to this but the best is a Curves Adjustment Layer with a mask.

Lower the White Output like so:

Then invert the mask (it was already inverted in the above screenshot) by clicking on the White square in your Layer Panel and hitting Ctrl/Cmd+i

Now with a small brush and low flow and/or opacity paint in the highlights.

You can then adjust the Curves or the Opacity of the Curves Adjustment to tune it further.