"Like a long-legged fly his mind moved upon silence..." (WBYeats)
I tend to skip several steps, and I will explain a bit more here.
An RGB-mode image is built up from all possible interactions of the three basic colours Red, Green and Blue, each one having 256 different intensities, or shades between pure light or white and total absence of light or black.
In the Channels Palette, you can click on each channel separately, and what you see is a greyscale image that shows how much red, or green, or blue is used for every pixel. (pixels are the mosaic building blocks of an image that puters can store in their memory).
I noticed in this partticular photograph of this pretty girl that the blue channel had the more detail and contrast. So I chose that one.
I hit Ctrl+A to select all, Ctrl+C to copy it to the clipboard, and then Ctrl+D to deselect. Then I clicked back on the top "channel" which restored the general view.
Back to the layers panel and with Ctrl+V I pasted the copy of the blue channel unto a layer. When I set this layer to Color Burn blending mode (in my first post I wrote Multiply, but that was a mistake. I often use multiply, but here it has to be CB), The face was a lot better, but the rest was wayyy too dark. So I added a layer mask to this layer (second icon from the left at the bottom of the layers palette), pressed Alt and clicked on the mask icon. This shows the empty mask: a white rectangle. Once again I pasted the channel copy, and this time on the mask. The intention is that the darker the colour in the original, the less it will be influenced.
By clicking on the eye icon left from the layer, the layer itself became back visible.
Much better, but the overall image was a bit too blue (like the original). That's also why the blue channel was the best in contrast. (here you must feel an aha experience, if not: reread these last phrases).
Being a painter, I have experience with what colours must look like for transparant washes of skin. So I chose the one I mentioned as foreground colour. I added another layer and Alt+Del filled it with that colour. Then I lowered the opacity with the slider on the layers palette.
The face got really ok, and but this is personal, the other colours also got much better. Leather is a bit more greyish than the blue of the original, and the brownish orange tempered the blue a bit. So I left that.
In case I would not have liked it, I could have used a layer mask here to cover everything but the face.
Of course, you can still add a tad of curves on the photographs to enhance the dynamic range and tonal balance.
Sorry for the Multiply mistake, and also for forgetting I was on the new users forum. I often skip details to make people think and find it out themselves. That way the pleasure rate is much higher and it is more easily remembered. [:I
Hope this makes things clearer...
And, 'rest assured' that you'll receive some good advice/tips on how to correct the deficiencies of such an image.