New fix to old problem: Red Blotchy Skin

So, Skin Depth Pro got a pretty big update, and I'm not gonna lie, I think I kind of outdid myself with this one.

The problem is incredibly simple: red, blotchy skin.

Red cheeks, red noses, uneven skin tone, blotchy chests and shoulders, weird patches of redness. If you've done portrait retouching or skin retouching in Photoshop for any length of time, you've dealt with this shit.

And obviously there are already plenty of ways to fix red skin in Photoshop. I've used a bunch of them myself over the years Hue/Saturation, Color Range, various masking, Curves, whatever gets the job done.

But while working on Skin Depth Pro, I started screwing around with a different approach and ended up with something that works way better than I expected.

The thing about correcting red skin is that it usually isn't JUST a color correction problem. Those red or flushed areas usually have a luminosity difference too. So selecting the reds and desaturating them, or shifting them toward yellow, can absolutely help, but sometimes the skin still doesn't actually match or look right.

That's what sent me down this particular Photoshop rabbit hole.

What I ended up doing was basically my "usual" of abusing Hue/Saturation as a selection tool (layer stacking, settings and blend mode maths ftw). It gives me very specific control over the skin colors I'm targeting, including the ramps into and out of that range. Once I have that, I can correct the hue and saturation while separately correcting the luminosity.

And because I'm Nino Batista the Color Science Nerd, and apparently incapable of leaving well enough alone, I kept fucking with it.

Now there's an automatic version that, in all my testing, probably handles 80+% of the red skin correction I've thrown at it with very little effort. There's also a manual version for more difficult skin or when you just want precise control. I incorporated Photoshop's AI skin masking, added a Hue Uniformity option, kept everything editable, and then realized the automatic version works really well for batch portrait editing too. That last part was a pretty nice bonus.

I've spent the last few days throwing all kinds of portraits at it, including a ridiculous number of AI-generated test images specifically created with uneven, red and blotchy skin. It keeps working.

I'm obviously not going to claim that I've invented skin color correction in Photoshop. This damn app has existed for approximately 9,741 years and people have been finding clever ways to retouch skin for most of them. But I genuinely don't remember seeing anybody approach this particular problem quite this way.

Mostly I'm just really fucking happy with it.

It's not some enormous, glamorous Photoshop breakthrough. It's a killer solution to a boring, extremely common portrait retouching problem that I think I've managed to make faster, more controllable, and substantially easier to repeat across multiple images.

The new red and blotchy skin correction tools are now part of NBP Skin Depth Pro 2.2, and existing Skin Depth Pro users get the update too.

Anyway. Off to go fix some red people.