If you want to save yourself a ton of time on special effects, you really want to learn to use the blender node. Here's a setup that uses that same vascular map to put blood on top of the skin instead of underneath. It works by not only modulating the diffuse color, but also by modulating (via a second blender) the specularity of the surface. I added fresnel blended reflection and blinn and combined that with the original skin-like blinn, modulated via the lightning map.

You could not do this right with photoshop - waste of time, because the effect is based on lighting and environment and camera angles.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)