Face textures too light!!

I'm trying to make a skin at the moment for a shape I'm building but it seems the skin is much lighter in SL than on my ps cs4 screen. Even when I upload the texture it looks ok but as soon as I put it on my screen it goes almost white in some normal lighting.

Is there a setting I'm not doing right?
Thanks

Is your avatar wearing a facelight? If so, get rid of that thing. They're hideous and they cause all kinds of problems.

Also, is it just the face, or is it the whole skin? Your description in your post seems a bit different from that in your title. If it's just the face, then my guess is a facelight is the problem. If it's the whole skin, then it's a matter of learning to account for the differences in lighting conditions between Photoshop and SL. If you're in a brightly lit location, your skin color could easily looked washed out, even if it's not really.

Your Windlight settings will also affect the look of your skin. If the gamma is pushed past 1.0 you will start to see a washing out in the highlight areas when compared to the flat texture you see in Photoshop. If you need to experiment with relatively skin neutral Windlight settings and don't feel like creating your own you can download some off my site here:

http://www.secondskinlabs.com/Downloads/downloads3.html

There are a bunch of WL settings in that file. Three of them are specifically designed for working with skins. They all have a name that includes "Nams_optimal_skin" in them, so they should be easy to spot in the list.

It also just occured to me that the appearance (editing) view is very different from the standard view. Always look at your skin outside the appearance editor if you are not already doing this.

I wish there was some way to turn off that horrid bodylight in appearance mode. My normal windlight setting (that I use so I can see what the heck I am doing) turns to bright, bright white under the appearance mode light :/

I concur on the facelight. I always turn off local lights under edit-preferences-graphics custom to work in SL. Lighting may be pretty, but it can really mess with your perception if you are trying to work with textures and prims.

Thanks for your replies, I'll try and set my viewer up so I can get some kind of standard light so I can see the textures properly.