remove red from faces

[PKrug]

I have a customer submitted photo I need to use. It is digital, RGB, 72dpi jpeg, 41"x28". It is of a doctor's office, a man & woman in front of a counter wearing white lab coats (the woman is VERY pale skinned), and 5 standing behind the counter. 4 are women wearing white shirts with navy blue vests and the center person being a man in a black sweater. He has a very ruddy face and is wearing glasses with glare.

I converted it to cmyk, reduced size, increased dpi and saved as a tif. My problem is that no matter which copy I use or how a try and adjust it, I end up with the center guy with a VERY red face, or if I try to remove some red, everything has a green caste. And I'm blowing out the white lab coats and almost blowing out the face of the woman in front.

PLEASE HELP me with some ideas on how to remove some red without turning everything green or blowin it out.

 

[jmgalvin]

The smudge tool works well for this. I use it all the time to get the "shinys" from people's faces in pics taken at presentations as well as to lighten the facial tones of blacks in stills taken on TV stages during dress rehearsal - in which the lighting is not good and the actors are not in makeup.

If you select the smudge tool, and set it at about 50% transparency, you can move it from a more natural toned part (like near the neck) and move into the red area. "Lighten" might work best with the tool, but you might have to experiment. What you'll be doing is dragging a more natural fleshtone into the red area. You just have to be careful to keep things natural.

 

[PierreVassle]

I think the best thing to do in this case is to mark the face of the "red guy" and go to adjustments>hue saturation> choose "red"> and turn down the "saturation" a little bit and make it a little more yellow with "hue".
Maybe you need to lighten the tones up aswell.

Good luck!

Pierre Vassle