In this tutorial we’re going to recover detail from the skin area and have it on a separate layer for full control :

Take an image with skin well exposed with flash or overexposed natural light, and select the skin areas / areas you wish to recover detail from :

You can use the magic wand tool for example after a selection of color range :

After doing a selection with the color range, choose the magic wand tool , press and hold SHIFT while clicking on other skins parts to ADD those to your selection, do the same with ALT pressed to detract from your selection.