Selecting Skin with Photoshop Colour Range

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Photoshop has a wealth of ways to make selections but skin comes with its own challenges so any help we can get from Photoshop is welcome …. step in Color Range. Color Range has been in Photoshop for some time, but the addition of Skin Tones is relatively new and can speed up the process quite considerably. In this post we’ll look at how well it can work and what to do when it gets a bit tricky.

Select Color Range from the Select Menu (1) and from the drop down menu choose Skin Tone (2). The wonderfully named Fuzziness slider allows some tweaking of the range of colour (3). The Selection Preview (4) allows you to see the selection that best suits the image. In this example I’m using the Quick Mask view, but others are available:

Once you click OK, Photoshop displays the selection as ‘marching ants’. I’ll adjust this image using a Curves adjustment to ‘bronze him a little…Read more