Struggling with Color Range > Skin Tones. Some pixels refuse to be selected

[dance621126]

I am shooting families on a white background. Part of my editing process is to select the whites of the studio (shades of grey usually) and bleach them with a curves layer. But first I want to preserve all the faces by selecting all the skin tones (Colour Range > Skin tones) and coping them into their own layer. This means I can ensure no edits effect the faces. The reason I need to do this is because young children have very fair skin and in some cases my grey selections are picking up some pixels in the faces.

So here is the problem. CS6 is not selecting the whole face. Here is an example...

I think that the marching ants are only surrounding pixels greater than 50% selected but the cheeks in this are not preserved. Here is an extreme example of the preserved faces being places on top of a heavily bleached rest of image..

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, James

[S_Gans]

The only way I can think to do this is, once you've got marching ants of the skin tones, use the Select>Save Selection menu option. Then, go back to selecting the skin using the top option in the color range box, getting all the areas you seem to have missed. When you have that, go back to Save Selection - but use ADD to channel and choose the channel you'd made for the first skin tone selection. That will result in a saved selection that has your initial selection AND the stuff you choose to have. Then, Load THAT resulting selection, and copy those pixels to a new layer, or use a layer mask on a duplicate layer. Hope that makes sense.

[Theresa J]

It’s very rare that any selection tool is going to be 100% perfect on any photo, and that includes color range selections. I recommend using the quick mask mode to fix the selection with a brush. You could do this very quickly and easy.

1. Make the selection

2. Enter quick mask with the ‘Q’ key

3. paint the quick mask to clean it up

4. Return to the selection with ‘Q’ key

You could do the same kind of selection edit in the Select and Mask workspace. I’m old school and think Quick Mask is probably faster for this type of masking.

[D Fosse]

Look at the whole image before assuming local adjustments are necessary! Why do you need to select at all here?

This is a simple Curves adustment, painted back ever so slightly with a large, soft brush on the child. This looks a lot better, right?

[dance621126]

Apologies I should have said that this will be part of an automated action. It is the old problem of some actions working well for some images but I cant get an action working for all images. The problem areas are the young childrens faces as they are naturally fairer than adults.

So I need a solution that does not require painting masks.

[D Fosse]

There are limits to what you can automate. Anything involving local adjustments or selections will probably not come out as you expected, simply because they relate to specific image content but the action doesn't. An action only deals with absolutes.

What you can do is tick the "dialog" icon in the action step. This stops the action and lets you do whatever you need to do, then hit enter and the action continues.