Ever had a portrait ruined by weird green shadows from foliage? Or maybe red bounce from a colourful wall? It happens more than you’d think, and it’s one of those things that can take an otherwise lovely image and just knock it sideways. This photoshop skin colour correction tutorial is here to fix exactly that.

In this short video, I’ll walk you through a simple, clean technique to remove colour cast in Photoshop – green, red, magenta, you name it – without touching the rest of the image. That last bit matters. Selective colour correction in Photoshop portrait work is the whole point. You don’t want to fix the skin and accidentally shift the background or the clothing in the process.

This builds on our popular redness-removal tutorial, but takes things a step further. We’re using Hue/Saturation adjustment layers combined with precise masking to target only the skin tones. It’s one of those Photoshop portrait retouching techniques that looks complicated from the outside but is actually remarkably straightforward once you see it in action.

Perfect for quickly sorting out light contamination from leaves, grass, or walls – the kind of thing that catches you out on location shoots when the light is doing something unexpected just off to one side.

Thanks to everyone who asked for this one. Enjoy!

What the Tutorial Covers

• Identifying colour contamination – spotting where the problem light is coming from and how it’s affecting the skin tones in the portrait.
• Adding a Hue/Saturation layer – the core of this photoshop skin colour correction tutorial, and why working on a specific channel rather than the master makes all the difference.
• Fine-tuning the adjustment – shifting the range up and down to target exactly the right part of the colour spectrum without overcooking it.
• Applying and refining the mask – making sure the Hue/Saturation layer only affects the skin tones, which is really the heart of selective colour correction in Photoshop portrait retouching.
• Final checks – confirming everything is working as it should before you call it done.

For more videos like this, head over to masteringportraitphotography.com – it’s absolutely full of ideas and techniques covering everything we love about portrait photography.