How to fixing skin tones in GIMP?

Software GIMP
1

This is a crop from one of my pictures in my photo series that addresses book burning, censorship, and information control. It’s not the full photo.

I would like to improve some things in this picture before publishing it on my site and social media. In order of priority:

  • Model on the right looks like he has a weird skin rash on the back of his neck. How do I make it look more normal?
  • Model on right - has a lump on his left leg from something in his pocket. Best way to have his pants form a smooth line down?
  • Lack of separation from the two male models’ heads and the background of the picture. I could have solved this with better lighting, but I didn’t, and here we are. What now?

What you’re looking at is the best I could do to go from the raw file in RawTherapee. I will finish editing in gimp. I can post a 16-bit tiff if needed, just ask.

I’m also open to stylistic suggestions on how to present this photo.

pixls-books

2

You could probably fix the red neck in several ways. I just tried using the “Color Balance” tool by reducing the reds on a duplicate layer and then apply a mask to make it only effective on the neck of the right model. I got quite good results with the “Cyan - Red” slider set to around -15. After that you could fix the remaining red spots by some simple healing/cloning.

To fix the pants you could use the warp transformation tool.

Just to give you an idea, here’s my result:
edited