Burning Down The Arm...

The first thing to realize is that this is my mistake.  Had I simply placed the woman on the other side of her husband, the light on her arm would not have been a problem, and she'd have been short lit, which would have been a much better option.  So, the real trick is to not have to fix this in Photoshop.

However, since I did make a mistake, and since technology is such that it is, I found a way to reduce the amount of distraction my problem made.  I have cropped the faces out of the image to protect the innocent .  I will also use false names to protect the guilty... from now on, call me Fred... or George.    (Ignore the name of the [im]poster, please.)

OK, so first is the original image (well, after Curves and Levels).




Then, this is the selection I made of the woman's arm:




And this is the layer settings I used:




And this is the final result, obviously much better, but still natural looking:




Thanks for reading this,
Fred... or George

P.S.  Do it right the first time, or you too will be forced to burn someone down!  And then they make you change your name, and start trying to find ways to get out of the country, and...

Excellent tutorial Travis, thanks for the help for future work.

A side note, people's skin vary in color, usually, the lightest is further away from the light, but, in some cases like this one, even if you lighting is perfect, a light skin individual may need some work.

No, there's no such thing as a perfect shot, all need some slight tweaking, and there's nothing wrong in doing so.

Actually, I did know that.  Thanks for the ideas though.  It is definitely a good way to go if that's your preference.

Might I suggest playing around with the two options, though.  The reason is that a brush will have a tendency to overlap edges and side of brush strokes, so it can be somewhat inconsistent (this could also be a reason to prefer it), whereas the layer can be used to make a very even adjustment over a specific area.  Another option would be to not make a selection at all and just apply the Multipy to the entire layer, mask it all with black, and then paint back white in the area you want it showing through.  This could almost give you the best of both worlds, because you could paint back different 'opacities' in varying areas in the image as well.

Just more food for thought.

Travis