Thanks to Jacques (@jdc) I can provide another, simpler, way to select most of the skin but excluding Mairi’s red hair, by using the recently introduced “mask” tool. You can see the screenshot below, showing the area affected by CbDL (in grey) and how it is achieved with the mask tool:
With the mask enabled, there’s no need to using excluding spots on the hair, the only excluding spots are for the eyes and mouth.
At first the use of the mask tool was confusing to me, but if I understand correctly, it works by removing some areas form the initial selection:
- when you add the RTspot, it uses the deltaE to “select” the destination pixels (those affected by the filter, here by CbDL), but sometimes such as in this example the deltaE between hair and skin is too small to allow a correct separation
- adding the mask will actually allow you to exclude some pixels from the initial selection, based on L(L), C(C ) or LC(H) equalizer. In this example, drawing a narrow notch in the LC(H) curve at the H corresponding to the hair allows to exclude it quite efficiently from the original selection, without affecting the skin selection.