Making two pictures match in both, color and lighting

One of the biggest fanart faux pas is when an artist neglects to adjust the skin tones and complexions of the subjects in the pictures used. This is especially distracting when trying to create a believable manipulation. In this tutorial, I will walk you through some of my own techniques by using the following two pictures. As you can see, they differ in color quite a bit. For the purposes of this tutorial, I have combined the images on one canvas. However, it is important that the layers are unmerged so we can color correct the layers indvidually.

First, Cordelia is much lighter and brigher than Angel. There’s lots of white on her whereas Angel has lots of darkness and red tones. What I am going to do to begin is add some Image >> Adjust >> Curves to Angel. Here are the levels I used:

And the result of that:

Not too bad, but there’s still some work to be done yet. Now I am going to apply some Image >> Adjust >> Selective Color to both layers. Honestly, this is a tool you just sort of have to play around with. I work with the different color modes and adjust them accordingly using my eye to make the pictures more matchy. After some tinkering I am left with this:

Okay. Now I want to relieve some of the shadowing on Angel’s face. Face it, it is kinda distracting because Cordelia has a different lighting scheme. There are a few ways to go about this. One way is with Filter >> Render >> Lighting Effects. But I am going to go about it another way. All I am going to do is take a large, soft bright and “dodge” the right half of Angel’s face. I have m dodge settings at “highlights” @ 22%. Then I am going to “burn” the right half of Cordelia’s face (again with a large, soft brush) with settings of “shadows” @ 54%. Here’s what we got now:

And then I lift up the contrast on Angel a bit to get the same light that Cordelia has.

There’s just a little more to do to Angel’s right side. It’s still shadowed and darkened. I’m not going to walk through it step by step, because settings do vary depending on what images you use. But basically, to “correct” this shadowing, I select the portion I want to modify with the lasso tool, feathered at 33%. From there I use a combination of curves and selective color. Flatten the images a little guassian blur (which I actually don’t use very often at all)….The final result is this:

Not perfect, yet a vast improvement, no? This is just another one of my techniques. However, I do have others as well. I think the trick is to learn what tools produce what different effects and discerning which technique would be appropriate for what it is you are “correcting”. It just takes some practice.