Step 5

Now click on the layer mask in the layers pallet. It should have a white outline around the thumbnail. Once you've done that, it means you've activated the layer mask. Now select the eraser tool and erase all the areas that orange isn't part of the skin. If you make a mistake, simply select the brush tool and paint back the area that you accidentally erased. Use a brush with a hardness of about 50 or higher or else you'll get a halo effect in the final outcome. If you have objects other than the skin that's orange too, don't paint that orange because it might be a different orange. You want to only paint one object at a time and each object with its own layer. Why? Because that orange object could be a different orange than your skin. It may be hard to see it now, but once you have all the layers, you'll see that the slightest difference makes the biggest change. Also, if you happen to want that object to be a different color, you can change it without affecting everything else.

Step 6

Now repeat those steps for the rest of the image except for the background. As you can see in the image below, the layer with yellow is for the hair and I have two separate red layers. One is for the lips and another is for her shirt which isn't shown. I made them in separate layers because I know that the color of the red shirt isn't the same red as her lips. Now the colors may look way too vibrant right now, but don't worry because we can fix that by modifying the adjustment layer color.

Step 7

Look at the image below. See what a big difference the color makes? What I did was I double clicked on each layer (the color thumbnail) and adjusted the color. I didn't change the hue, I only picked the same color with a different saturation and lightness. I changed the skin to a more tanned color, hair to a more neutral beigh color, and look at the lips and shirt; before they were just two red layers but after adjusting the color, you can clearly see that they're very different colors after I tweaked it. Now I had to go back into a few layer masks to touch up some areas, so if there isn't anything perfect, you can fix it up right now and not having to worry about undoing a bunch of steps and redoing everything. This is the power of non-destructive adjustment layers and layer masks.

Step 8

We're almost done, but first we have to color the background and most importantly the eyes. Eyes are not black and white, they can be dark brown, but they're not black. What I did was I created a new solid color adjustment layer below all the other adjustment layers. This can be done by clicking on the "New Adjustment Layer" button in the Layers pallet and selecting Solid Color. I selected dark blue as the color and painted her eyes. I cheated a bit and created both the background and eyes on the same layer because I wanted the background color to affect her eyes. This will make the photo more interesting and increase the focus to her blue eyes.