Whatever you use to change the contrast, just keep your eye on your histogram and on the image ... you should be able to see when the texture of the skin begins to blow out. If you still need contrast, you can keep going and then you can either use a clone stamp or some noise on an overlay layer to return some texture to the skin. As for the roots, yea ... if I really needed to do that, I would take care of that on a seperate layer, controlling the roots on their own so they don't go dark(er). And yup, I used curves and blending modes - a duplicate of the image blended with softlight and reduced opacity. -=>Donald